The Impact of Mitigation Strategies on Geographical Distance Issues in GSD: An Empirical Evaluation

Abstract

Geographical distance is a critical risk for communication in global software development (GSD) project; they badly affect projects' quality, cost, and schedule. Thus, it leads the project toward failure. Mitigation practices help organizations to achieve the desired quality of the product within limited time and budget constraints. One of the literature studies conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify geographical distance risks that jeopardize communication among distributed team members, their relevant mitigation strategies and propose a conceptual framework. However, to the best of our knowledge, the conceptual framework is not empirically validated. Therefore, it is difficult to explain the exact relationship between geographical distance challenges and mitigation strategies. The main objective of this research is to empirically evaluate the framework to analyze the impact of identified mitigation strategies on geographical distance risks. Empirical evaluation has been performed on data collected from GSD based organizations. The finding of our study shows that all mitigation strategies have a significant impact on geographical distance risks with a p-value<0.01. Based on the results, our research can help software organizations to tackle geographical distance risks by using appropriate mitigation strategies to reduce the software project's failure rate.