Better validation in a world-wide development environment

Increasingly software projects are handled in a global and distributed project set-up. Global software development however also challenges traditional techniques of software engineering, such as peer reviews or teamwork. Especially validation activities during development, such as inspections need to be adjusted to achieve results, which are both efficient and effective. Effective teamwork and coaching of engineers highly contribute towards successful projects. We will in this article evaluate experiences with validation activities in a global setting within Alcatel's Switching and Routing business. We will investigate 3 hypotheses related to effects of collocated inspections, intensive coaching, and feature-oriented development teams on globally distributed projects. As all these activities mean initial investment compared to a standard process with scattered activities, the major validation criteria for the 3 hypotheses is cost reduction due to earlier defect detection and less defects introduced. The data is taken from a sample of over 60 international projects of various sizes from which we collected all type of product and process metrics in the past 4 years.