Scrum Practice Mitigation of Global Software Development Coordination Challenges: A Distinctive Advantage?

Global software development is a major trend in software engineering. Practitioners are increasingly trying Agile methods in distributed projects to tap into the benefits experienced by co-located teams. This paper considers the issue by examining whether Scrum practices, used in four global software development projects to leverage the benefits of Agile methods over traditional software engineering methods, provided any distinctive advantage in mitigating coordination challenges. Four temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance-based coordination challenges and seven scrum practices are identified from the literature. The cases are analyzed for evidence of use of the Scrum practices to mitigate each challenge and whether the mitigation mechanisms employed relate to any distinctive characteristics of the Scrum method. While some mechanisms used were common to other/ traditional methods, it was found that Scrum offers a distinctive advantage in mitigating geographical and socio-cultural but not temporal distance-based GSD coordination challenges. Implications are discussed.