Muhammad Ilyas and Siffat Ullah Khan Software Engineering Research Group (SERG_UOM), Deptartment of Computer Science & IT, University of Malakand, KPK, Pakistan. milyasmkd@gmail.com, siffatullah@uom.edu.pk Abstract. Global software development (GSD) is in a booming stage from the last decade with the advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Despite of the benefits gained from GSD, the developer organizations still face a lot of difficulties in integrating the software components, developed by various GSD teams, into a final product. The objective of the study presented in this paper is to find out critical success factors (CSFs) for vendors that can play a positive role at any stage of the software integration process. To achieve the purpose we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) for the identifications of the factors that can be adapted to assist the integration process at various stages i.e. before integration, during integration and after the integration. We have found a total of fourteen success factors among which nine factors are ranked as CSFs. Some of the top ranked CSFs are “Consistency in Requirements and Architecture Design”, “Intra and inter team Communication and Coordination” and “Component/Unit Testing prior to integration”. Keywords: Global Software Development, Systematic Literature Review, Software Product Integration, Success Factors 1 INTRODUCTION Global software development (GSD) is in a booming stage from the last decade with the advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is an emerging trend to perform software development activities across national boundaries. In GSD the clients and vendors are scattered at different geographical locations. The development team may itself be spread at different locations of the globe. GSD offers many benefits, like exploitation of a 24-hour working day, decreasing the cost by off shoring the development work to low wages countries, solving the local IT skills shortage and showing the presence of vendors at different local markets[1, 2]. However , GSD is still not mature and is in developing stage [3, 4]. Along with its booming hype, there are decisive barriers which impede GSD, like diverse cultures, time zone differences, language differences, inadequate communication, knowledge management, poor contract management, poor relationship management etc [1, 5]. Most of the researchers have focused on non-technical issues while ignoring one of the most critical and technical issue i.e. the integration of software components[6, 7]. Whether developed in-house or outsourced, or the software components may be commercial off the shelf (COTS) or off the shelf (OTS), finally we have to integrate them into a final working product. What factors can alleviate the integration phase and what factors jeopardize it? This has not yet been explored by the researchers as is evident from the literature “areas like product integration have received surprisingly little attention” [7]. Similarly Tekumalla [6] state that “regarding the research on integration of components, we observed that the number of industrial case studies is not adequate enough to cover various issues associated with it”. Despite of the importance of the integration phase in software development, little empirical research has been done on integration practices and solutions in general and for identifications of success factors for integration in particular. The main aim of our research work is to develop a software integration model (SIM) [8] to assist GSD vendors in successful and effective integration of software components/products. In order to bridge the gap and to ease the integration process in GSD environment, we have formulated five main research questions as published in the SLR protocol for this study in [9]. In this paper we have reported the findings of RQ1 supplemented by RQ1-a. The remaining aforementioned research questions, RQ2-RQ5, are part of our future work. RQ1: What are the success factors, as identified in the literature, to be adopted by GSD vendors at various stages of the product integration, i.e. before, during and after the integration process in GSD environment? RQ1-a Do the identified factors vary from product to product? The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, related work is presented. In Section 3, the design of this study is presented. In Section 4, results of the SLR relevant to the above research questions are reported, and Section 5 present limitation of the study. Conclusion and future work is described in Section 6. 2 BACKGROUND McConnel [10] describes integration as “the software development activity in which you combine separate software components into a single system”. Many hidden errors of the earlier phases appear in the integration phase. The integration phase becomes more complicated in GSD environment due to little communication and coordination[8]. Although integration has attracted little attention and developers have contemplated it as only a formality but most of the software projects during testing are delayed because of the integration process due to the complexities and incompatibilities found between components in this phase [11, 12]. Integration strategy must be properly planned while embarking into the software development before harnessing the components developed [13]. Many researchers worked on the software integration, some of the important studies are as follow. Paloheimo [14] in “Feasibility of SW Architecture Integration in a Distributed R&D Environment” state that “as the integration phase is usually the last to follow in a software development process the unnoticed problems in the preceding 978-1-4799-8676-7/15/$31.00 copyright 2015 IEEE SNPD 2015, June 1-3 2015, Takamatsu, Japan