Architectural Viewpoints for Global Software Development

Global Software Development (GSD) can be considered as the coordinated activity of software development that is not localized and central but geographically distributed. Designing an appropriate software architecture of a GSD system is important to meet the requirements for the communication, coordination and control of the distributed GSD teams. A common practice in software architecture design is to apply architectural views to model the design decisions for the various stakeholder concerns. Unfortunately, existing architectural viewpoint approaches are general-purpose and not directly dedicated towards GSD projects. In this paper we propose six architectural viewpoints that have been specifically defined to model GSD systems. The architectural viewpoints are based on a meta-model that has been derived after a thorough domain analysis of the GSD literature.