Cloud-Based Support for Global Software Engineering: Potentials, Risks, and Gaps Mohammed Al-qadhi Department of Computer Science City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong SAR, China +852 3442 2306 moalqadhi2-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Jacky Keung Department of Computer Science City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong SAR, China +852 3442 2591 jacky.keung@cityu.edu.hk ABSTRACT Global Software Engineering (GSE) aims at utilizing global expertise and reducing time-to-market and costs for software development. However, GSE faces serious challenges related to the communication, coordination and provision of development environments for geographically distributed GSE sites, resulting in increased costs. Nowadays, cloud computing offers a cost- effective and a handy solution to provide computing support for global business. In particularly, it provides potential and viable solutions to address concerns and challenges in GSE. We have reviewed the relevant literature on cloud-based support for GSE and identified a set of pros and cons for supporting GSE with cloud services. We also present some recommendations to increase the trustworthiness and productivity with cloud-based support for GSE. This paper outlines the potential benefits and risks of cloud computing to GSE and identifies some gaps that need to be addressed by cloud-based support towards more trustworthy and productive work environment for GSE. This will open windows of opportunities for tailoring the solution utilizing cloud-based support for GSE. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management—Programming teams; K.6.4 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]: System Management—Centralization/decentralization. General Terms Management, Standardization. Keywords Cloud Computing, Global Software Engineering (GSE). 1. INTRODUCTION The notion of globalism is penetrating almost all today’s world facets. Software Engineering is not an exception where the trend of Global Software Engineering (GSE) became more wide spreading. GSE means that software is developed across borders by teams scattered across different geographical areas (see Figure 1). Adoption of GSE model contributes effectively to software business by capitalizing on global resource pools, reducing development costs and time-to-market through round- the-clock development [5, 17]. Figure 1. An overview of GSE process. However, GSE faces some challenges including: geographic, cultural, linguistic, and temporal (i.e. difference in term of time zones) dimension forming what is called global distance [6-8, 15]. Another big challenge of GSE is associated with the effort needed for building on-premises IT infrastructure needed to run a project whose development team is dispersed across multiple geographical areas which is costly. These costs include the effort needed for installation, licensing, monitoring the performance and maintaining all software and hardware within all development sites. Advent of cloud computing model has provided the enterprises with an opportunity to reduce the costs of establishing IT infrastructure by offering computing resources as utilities and converting computing expenses from capital expenses into operational ones [25]. Also, cloud computing can provide an extensive support to the spectrum of project engineering and management tasks of GSE [16]. Research has shown that cloud computing can make GSE activities cost-effective and easier despite of the difficulties posed by global distance between geographically distributed teams. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the main potential benefits and inevitable risks that GSE will have as a result of supporting it with cloud services. Benefits are enhancements of the following aspects: productivity, testing, overall GSE process, IT operations and content management. In addition, it helps reducing negative effect of global distance and encouraging standards adoption. On the other hand, risks include: existence of task dependencies, unavailability of network connectivity, effect of cloud-based platform on code commitment and integration, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. InnoSWDev'14, November 16, 2014, Hong Kong, China. Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3226-2/14/11... $15.00. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. InnoSWDev’14, November 16, 2014, Hong Kong, China Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3226-2/14/11...$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2666581.2666583 57