Green Agility for Global Software Development Vendors: A Systematic Literature Review Protocol Nasir Rashid, and Siffat Ullah Khan* Department of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Malakand, Lower Dir, Pakistan Abstract: Global software development (GSD) is now-a-days pervasive in software industry aiming to develop global standard software through geographically distributed skilled teams in minimum time and cost. In order to meet the demand for green software production and fre quent changes in requirements of the clients, GSD developers have revamped traditional methods and trying to incorporate green principles with agile methods for rapid and energy efficient software development. This paper presents our contribution to building a systematic literature review (SLR) protocol for green agile maturity (GAM) for GSD vendor organizations. The protocol aims to systematically review the available literature for the identification of success/risk factors that may have a direct or indirect effect on green and sustainable software development using agile methods. The desired outcome of SLR protocol will be a group of success/risk factors and their concerned practices that will be helpful for vendors to produce green and environmentally sustainable software by incorporating agile principles in global software development. Keywords: Green software, sustainable software, green agile, global software development, SLR Protocol. 1. INTRODUCTION Global software development (GSD) is growing rapidly due to increase in globalization of software business industry [1]. In GSD, software engineers and developers from various countries with different cultures and time zones participate in the development process. Distributed experts at diverse locations coordinate through the latest knowledge sharing and communication tools [2]. GSD offers tremendous benefits that include access to skilled pool of software developers, production of high standard software, business advantage of proximity to markets, quick access to software development updates and the possibility to use “follow-the-sun” and “round–the-clock” development. Hence software development is now considered as a globally distributed endeavour [3- 4]. However, GSD unlocks new doors for software business yet it also yields a number of challenges that comprises hidden agreement costs, dearth of client involvement, splitting and allocation of work at different sites, lack of trust among the outsourcing companies and scarcity of software development outsourcing practices [5-6]. Agile software development is invigorating approach towards quick and interactive software development. It provides a conceptual structure for undertaking any software project that is co-located or globally distributed. Unlike traditional methods of software development, agile methods attempt to reduce risks and maximize software productivity by developing software in short iterations [7]. Agile approaches rely on individual developers‟ skills rather than formalized processes and cumbersome amount of documentation [8]. Thus, agile methods pursue to avoid suggesting overwhelming processes, having little contribution to software product [9]. Using agile methods in distributed software development offers several benefits like constant communications and scheduled delivery of software, continuous integration of software code, improved project‟s quality and efficiency, nominal Research Article Proceedings of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences 52 (4): 301–313 (2015) Pakistan Academy of Sciences Copyright © Pakistan Academy of Sciences ISSN: 0377 - 2969 (print), 2306 - 1448 (online) ———————————————— Received, June 2015; Accepted, November 2015 *Corresponding author: Siffat Ullah Khan; Email: siffatullah@uom.edu.pk