Management of distributed concurrent development for large scale software systems

The article discusses a new software process model, distributed concurrent development, and its experience in developing a family of large-scale communication software systems. We have experienced an evolutionary change of our software development process. The change is spread into two dimensions, that is, from sequential to concurrent, and from centralized to distributed. With the concurrent development process model, multiple functions to a single software system are concurrently developed from the beginning of the development process, i.e. requirement specification, to system testing. In the distributed development process model, the development organization is decentralized into multiple development sites which are geographically distributed. The two dimensional changes require a fundamental re-think of our software process and brought about a significant impact on every aspect of software development activities ranging from individual developers to the entire project. We discuss the model, the issues in implementing the model, and our total system of managing the process, project and products.