A canvas for establishing global software development collaborations

There is an increasing need and interest for organizations to collaborate with internal and external partners on a global scale for creating software-based products and services. Potential risks and different strategies need to be addressed when setting up such collaborations. Aspects such as cultural and social features, coordination, infrastructure, organizational change processes, or communication issues need to be considered. Although there are already experiences available with respect to setting up global collaborations, they mainly focus on specific areas. It is difficult for companies to quickly assess if they have considered all relevant aspects. An overall aid that guides companies in systematically setting up global collaborations is widely missing. In this paper we present a study based on the snowballing method as a systematic approach to literature review. Based on this literature review and inputs from industry we investigated what aspects and practices need to be considered when establishing global software development collaborations and how to prioritize them. Based on that we created activity roadmaps that aggregate existing experiences. Reported experiences were structured into nine main aspects each containing extracted successful practices for setting up global software development collaborations. As a result we came up with an initial version of a canvas that is proposed as guidance for companies for setting up global collaborations in the software development domain. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.