Leveraging resources in global software development

Leveraging global resources for software development is rapidly becoming the norm at Motorola, which has over 25 software development centers worldwide. Our project, called the 3G Trial (Third Generation Cellular System), was the first of its scope and significance developed by a global engineering team at Motorola. Staffing was the most significant issue we encountered in the 3G Trial. We had only about 20 percent of the required staff available at our division headquarters in Burlington Heights, Ill., US, and needed to find the other 80 percent to successfully complete the project. Early on, we concluded that our only means to staff the project was to rely on software development engineers from Motorola's worldwide software centers. We developed the system with staffing from six different countries. Next, we had to integrate the people into a team. While addressing this challenge, we identified key risk factors and developed approaches to reduce them. We separated the project risk factors into the five categories Carmel (1999) describes as the centrifugal forces that pull global projects apart. To pass on the lessons we learned from this project, this article sets out the global development issues we faced, our approaches to resolving them, and our findings compared to other research.