Communications of Cloud Software

ADDING A NEW TEAM IN THE CLOUD-BASED DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE PROJECT: A CROSS-CASE ANALYSIS OF KEY CHALLENGES: Distributed Software Development (DSD) in the cloud is rapidly increasing. Ramping up cloud infrastructure is inherent to cloud-based services, but adding a new offshore team to the existing cloud-based DSD project may pose several technical and non-technical challenges. In particular, effective ways to set up and integrate new teams for DSD projects on cloud-based platforms is insufficiently understood. This paper presents a qualitative case study that examines a cloud-based DSD project in which a new team from a development site in Helsinki is added in an ongoing project with two sites in Madrid. The focus of the analysis is to examine the key challenges when adding a new team in a cloud-based DSD project. A cross-case qualitative analysis is performed based on the focus group conducted at the Helsinki and Madrid sites. Participant observations and selective e-mail logs were also used as supplementary data for the analysis. The study reveals that ramping up cloud infrastructure in the cloud-based DSD with a new team is particularly challenging from three perspectives: 1) exchanging cloud-based project’s architecture with a new team, 2) determining the right cloud access controls for a newly added team and 3) developing scalable team design parallel to cloud infrastructure for future team ramp-up.
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