Current trends in software engineering show that large software projects have to operate with teams that are working in globally distributed locations. The reason behind this globalization of software development stems from clear business goals such as reducing cost of development, solving local IT skills shortage, and supporting outsourcing and offshoring. There is ample reason that these factors will be even stronger in the future, and as such we will face a further globalization of software development. Global Software Engineering is a relatively new paradigm of software development that can be considered as the coordinated activity of software development that is not localized and central but geographically distant. A GSE architecture usually consists of several nodes, or sites, on which different teams are working to develop a part of a system. Despite its envisaged benefits, GSE is not a trivial undertaking and has to cope with different challenges in different domains including software architecture, eliciting and communicating requirements, setting up suitable environments and tools, and orchestration. A close analysis of the literature in GSE shows that little attention has been paid on the software architecting process and software architecture as an artifact in the context of GSE. As a consequence of this situation, the problems related to architecting the large and complex systems required in GSE have not been explicitly addressed.
This workshop aims 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. The topics of the workshop can be listed as follows:
Software Architecture Modeling of GSD
Modeling Software Architectures for GSD
Software Architecture Viewpoints for GSD
Software Architecture Description Languages for GSD
Software Architecture Patterns for GSD
Documenting Software Architectures of GSD
Architectural Requirements Analysis of GSD
Analysis and evaluation of Software Architectures of GSD
Quality Models for Software Architectures of GSD
Tools for Designing and Analyzing GSD
Experiences in Architecting GSD
Managing architectural independencies in GSD teams
Role of architecture in GSD project and process governance
Architectural knowledge as control mechanism
Sharing and using distributed architectural knowledge
Approaches for early stages of architecture design in GSD projects
Architectural styles and patterns for supporting GSD teams
Cultural influence on architectural processes and artefacts