Lessons Learned in Virtual Teams from Global Software Development

Abstract

Increasing globalization has strongly urged software organizations to lower software development costs and access to best skilled resources, which lead using of global software development team as one of many possible solutions. More and more software companies have become multinational and used benefits of offshore insourcing, outsourcing and virtual software development team in order to increase their competiveness and keep their software development cost down. However, substantial number of them fails to achieve their expected high result due to many inherent drawbacks of virtual software development and software companies have limited time and budget for researching these problems and ways to successfully solve them. The paper investigates major factors that enable global software development teams work successfully based on literature. Methodology applied for the research is literature review. Lately, many researches have been done on understanding success factors of global software development. Contribution of the paper, is presenting lessons learned from previous researches, which have been made on the subject. The paper concludes with summarized lessons learned as guideline for effectively using a global team in IT companies.