Global Software Engineering (GSE), developing software with geographically distributed teams, has raised not only several new challenges but has also highlighted the needs of revisting and/or enhancing the existing software engineering approaches. One of such challenges is architecting for GSE projects, which requires organizations and architects to rethink the role and suitability of existing approaches and processes for supporting the activities related to architecting (i.e., process) and software architecture (i.e., artefacts). GSE and software architecture seem to be two distinct domains and communities but they appear to have a lot in common when it comes to architecting a system which does not introduce extensive complexities for the geographically distributed team or providing architectural support for GSE. However, there has been little effort in bringing these two domains together for cross fertilization.
This apparent gap motivated us (Bedir, Semih, Patricia, and I) to co-organize a workshop on the topic of “Architecting in Global Software Engineering” during the the 6th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2011), in Helsinki, Finland. The workshop aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners for defining and advancing the state-of-the-art and state-of-the practice in architecture design of global software development systems. Further details about the workshop’s objectives and themes can be found on the workshop web page. Based on the discussion during the workshop, we are writing a report which will outline the key research challenges which needs to be addressed in
order provide a strong architectral support for GSE teams. This report will soon be released from the workshop website.