Software Project Management Approaches for Global Software Development： A Systematic Mapping Study

Global Software Development （GSD） is a well established field of software engineering with the benefits of a global environment. Software Project Management （SPM） plays a key role in the success of GSD. As a result, the need has arisen to study and evaluate the downsides of SPM for GSD, to thereby pave the way for the development of new methods, techniques, and tools with which to tackle them. This paper aims to identify and classify research on SPM approaches for GSD that are available in the literature, to identify their current weaknesses and strengths, and to analyze their applications in industry. We performed a Systematic Mapping Study （SMS） based on six classification criteria. Eighty-four papers were selected and analyzed. The results indicate that interest in SPM for GSD has been increasing since 2006. As a class of approaches, the most frequently reported methods （40%） are those used for coordination, planning, and monitoring, along with estimation techniques that can be used to better match a distributed project. SPM for GSD requires further investigation by researchers and practitioners, particularly with respect to cost and time estimations. These findings will help overcome the challenges that must to be considered in future SPM research for GSD, especially regarding collaboration and time-zone differences.

Empirical Research in Software Engineering -- A Literature Survey

Empirical research is playing a significant role in software engineering （SE）, and it has been applied to evaluate software artifacts and technologies. There have been a great number of empirical research articles published recently. There is also a large research community in empirical software engineering （ESE）. In this paper, we identify both the overall landscape and detailed implementations of ESE, and investigate frequently applied empirical methods, targeted research purposes, used data sources, and applied data processing approaches and tools in ESE. The aim is to identify new trends and obtain interesting observations of empirical software engineering across different sub-fields of software engineering. We conduct a mapping study on 538 selected articles from January 2013 to November 2017, with four research questions. We observe that the trend of applying empirical methods in software engineering is continuously increasing and the most commonly applied methods are experiment, case study and survey. Moreover, open source projects are the most frequently used data sources. We also observe that most of researchers have paid attention to the validity and the possibility to replicate their studies. These observations are carefully analyzed and presented as carefully designed diagrams. We also reveal shortcomings and demanded knowledge/strategies in ESE and propose recommendations for researchers.