On the relationship between process maturity and geographic distribution

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On the relationship between process maturity and geographic distribution: an empirical analysis of their impact on software quality

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Foundations of Software Engineering archive
Proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering on European software engineering conference and foundations of software engineering symposium table of contents

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

SESSION: Empirical software engineering table of contents

Pages 101-110

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-001-2

Authors

Marcelo Cataldo	Bosch Corporate Research, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Sangeeth Nambiar	Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, Bangalore, India

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

An extensive body of research has developed in the area of software processes improvement and maturity models. Despite being a quite influential body of work, little is known about how software process maturity models and improvement activities relate to a major trend in the software industry: geographic distribution of development activities. In this paper, we seek to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between software process maturity and geographic distribution. In particular, we studied their combined impact on software quality. Using data from a multi-national software development organization, our analyses revealed that process maturity and the multiple dimensions of distribution have a significant impact on the quality of software components. More importantly, our analyses showed that the benefits of increases in process maturity diminish as the development work becomes more distributed, a result that has major implications for future research work in the process and the global software engineering literature as well as important implications for practitioners.

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