Freelancers: A Global Software Engineering Approach for Small Projects

Globally-distributed projects are rapidly becoming the norm for large software systems. Generally larger software projects can be managed globally because of their big budgets. But small projects which have very low budget (it could be as low as $30) it's not possible to manage them globally like large projects. As managing large projects globally saves lot of cost and time, managing small projects in such a way will overrun the budget hugely. This paper describes the approach of using freelancers for global development of small/low budget projects and the challenges that stand in the way of adopting it. The paper also suggests some best practices to overcome these challenges.