Prioritization-Based Taxonomy of Global Software Development Challenges: A FAHP Based Analysis

Global Software Development (GSD) continues to receive interest from software industry due to potential economic benefits. Management of GSD projects is not straightforward due to involvement of different geographically distributed teams who collaborate to produce a software. The objective of this study is to prioritize the challenges faced by practitioners during management of a GSD project. A questionnaire survey was developed to collect feedback from GSD practitioners about relative importance of 20 challenges reported in literature. Next, the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) was used to rank the challenges associated with management of GSD projects. The study provides a prioritization-based taxonomy of challenges associated with management of GSD projects. We believe software organizations can use the taxonomy to better plan and manage GSD projects.