Coordination between global agile teams: From process to architecture

Traditional process-centric software development has served software-intensive companies well for decades. During recent years, however, the trends of increased adoption of software product lines, software ecosystems and in particular global software engineering have lead to unmanageable complexity and unacceptable overhead. In this paper we present research performed at three global companies in which we studied the relation be-tween large-scale and agile approaches to software development as well as current problems. In addition, by integrating the best practices adopted at the case study companies, we present an alternative approach: architecture-centric software engineering. This approach largely removes inter-team dependencies and provides much higher efficiency and productivity in global software development contexts