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Research Article

Impact of agile management on project performance: Evidence from I.T sector of Pakistan

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Management Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Wah Cantt, Pakistan

Roles Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Roles Data curation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Department of Management Science, Riphah International University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision

Affiliation Department of Civil Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, Wah Cantt, Pakistan

Roles Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation

Roles Project administration, Resources, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Project administration, Validation

Roles Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Wah Cantt, Pakistan

• Umer Muhammad, 
• Tahira Nazir, 
• Najam Muhammad, 
• Ahsen Maqsoom, 
• Samina Nawab, 
• Syeda Tamkeen Fatima, 
• Khuram Shafi, 
• Faisal Shafique Butt

• Published: April 5, 2021
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Over the past several years, global project management teams have been facing dynamic challenges that continue to grow exponentially with the increasing number of complexities associated with the undertaken tasks. The ever-evolving organizational challenges demand project managers to adapt novel management practices to accomplish organizational goals rather than following traditional management practices. Considering which, the current study aims to explain the effect of agile management practices upon project performance directly as well as while being mediated through project complexity. Furthermore, the aforementioned mediatory relationship is evaluated in terms of the moderating effect of leadership competencies. The current study utilized the survey approach to collect the data from registered I.T firms deployed in the potential metropolitans of each province of Pakistan including, Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore, Sialkot, Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Sukkur, and Karachi. A total of 176 responses were utilized for statistical evaluations. As result, it was observed that the negative influence anticipated by project complexity on project performance was compensated by the agile management practices. Further, the leadership competencies played a pivotal role in managing project complexity while implementing agile management practices and therefore enhancing project performance. The current study abridges the potential knowledge gap conceptually by evaluating the direct impact of agile management upon project performance while considering all of its aspects, exploring the mediatory role of project performance and evaluating the moderating role of leadership competencies in attaining optimum project performance. In contextual terms, the current study fills the knowledge gap by gauging the implications of agile management practices within the I.T sector of Pakistan. The results of the current study can be a potential guide for both the academicians and the industry professionals.

Citation: Muhammad U, Nazir T, Muhammad N, Maqsoom A, Nawab S, Fatima ST, et al. (2021) Impact of agile management on project performance: Evidence from I.T sector of Pakistan. PLoS ONE 16(4): e0249311. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311

Editor: Dejan Dragan, Univerza v Mariboru, SLOVENIA

Received: October 1, 2020; Accepted: March 16, 2021; Published: April 5, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Muhammad et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting information files.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The agile management approach in terms of project development process remains rather a novel practice for most of the organizations of today to adapt and practice. Regardless, recent studies have indicated that organizations around the globe considering their long terms benefits are adapting the agile management practices more, in comparison to the traditionally followed waterfall management practices; especially in the IT sector. Research so far has highlighted the relevance of the agile management practices as well as has justified its constructive impact on the performance of an organization [ 1 , 2 ]. In specific to the management trends being followed, a recent global report of PMI comprising opinion of 727 executive members deployed on 3,234 projects across Europe, Asia Pacific, North America, Latin American, Middle East, Africa, and Caribbean Regions, proposed the implementation of agile management practices as a potential reason to trigger organizational productivity. Therefore, signifying the impact of agile management practices upon the performance of the firms [ 3 ]. Moreover, another recent study conducted by Ambysoft indicated agile management practices to deliver a success rate of 55% in comparison to the waterfall management practices with a success rate of 29% only. The report further indicated that 36% of the projects completed under the agile management practices remained challenged and required limited fulfillment of constraints to accomplish the projects. In contrast, the waterfall management practices were credited 67% of the challenged projects. The study also revealed the agile management practices to be attributed with only a mere 3% of project failure rate [ 4 ]. Thus, justifying the constructive impact of agile management practices in terms of enhanced performance measures. Regardless, the precise study indicating the impact of implementing agile management practices upon the project performance while considering all of its related aspects is yet to be explored [ 5 , 6 ]. Considering the potential research gap, the current study took into account of all relevant aspects of project performance including ‘time’, ‘finances’, ‘magnitude of efforts’, ‘work environment moral’, ‘fulfillment of quality criterions’ as well as the ‘satisfaction of regarding stakeholders’ and further observed the variation, in terms of the implementation of the agile management practices.

Considering the organizational accomplishment related aspect of the current research, the performance associated with the projects is often challenged by the magnitude of the complexity faced by the firms. Complexity, if not addressed timely can rile up to potential risks and consequently result in declined performance to a limit where it can jeopardize the existence of an organization itself. Considering which, research so far has indicted that implementation of relevant management practices can enable the mitigation of complexity associated to a project [ 7 , 8 ]. As Sohi, Hertogh [ 9 ] in their recent study were able to justify the association of agile management practices with the abridged level of project complexity to some extent. It was further speculated by the researchers to enhance the project performance of any given firm. Therefore, to address the existing knowledge gap the current study took into account the mediating role of project complexity, to be able to analyze the direct impact of agility upon project complexity as well as the project performance. Moreover, justify the theorized impact of agility in terms of reduced project complexity and enhanced project performance.

Taking into account the managerial aspect of the current study, prior studies have indicated that the efficient and effective implementation of management practices for the most part has remained predominated by the human factor, and of which leadership competencies is of most vital consideration [ 10 ]. In various contexts, the effective implementation of leadership competencies has been found to have a significant impact on the overall organizational performance of any given firm [ 11 , 12 ]. In relevance, a consolidated view of the implementation of leadership competencies to mitigate the organizational complexities and enhance performance measures is yet to be evaluated [ 13 ]. It is very much expectant of the agile management practices to depict enhanced performance as a result of effective leadership competency mitigating the magnitude of dynamic organizational challenges. Considering which, the current study evaluated the moderating role of leadership competencies to observe the controlled impact of professional complexities and the delivered project performance. Therefore, filling in the existing conceptual knowledge gap indicated by prior researchers.

Furthermore, in specific to filling in the contextual research gap, the current study explored the implication of the targeted variables within the I.T sector of Pakistan, which itself has seen significant progression over the years.

The present study aims to accomplish the following research objectives:

• RO1 : Determine the effect of agile management practices on project performance .
• RO2 : Evaluate the mediating role of project complexity between agile management practices and project performance .
• RO3 : Gauge the moderating role of leadership competencies between agile management practices and project complexity .

The following sections of the study comprises of the detailed literature review of all the opted variables of the current study as well as their hypothetical development. Further, the methodological approach to collect the data from the targeted population is presented, which is then further statistically evaluated and explained in the results and analysis section. Followed to which, the deduction based upon the evaluated results are presented in the discussion. Lastly, the outcomes of the current research are deduced in the conclusion section.

Literature review

Agile management..

The concept of agile management got tossed in 1991 when the term agility was defined in a report by the Lacocca Institute, as “the ability to thrive in rapidly changing, fragmented markets”. As the concept evolved, agility was redefined as, “the state or quality of being able to move quickly in an easy fashion”. Therefore, for any firm labeled as agile is expectant to resolve unforeseeable challenges. Therefore, assuring the organizational sustainability in uncertain environments [ 14 , 15 ]. The concept of agile management is multifaceted in nature and the remnants of its implementation have been observed across various disciplines over last few decades. Most early implementation of agile management practices was embraced by the manufacturing sector. At time, agility was defined as, “the capability of an organization to meet changing market requirements, maximize customer service levels and resultantly minimize the cost of goods” [ 16 ]. The agile management practices for a decade and more remained implemented within the manufacturing industry only [ 17 ]. It wasn’t until the commercialization of the internet in 1995 when the agile management practices attained maturity in other industrial sectors as well, especially the software development [ 18 ]. To formalize the agility practices in terms of the software development process the OOPSA conference held in the same year played a momentous role when Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland defined the cardinal principles for the implementation of agility on an organizational scale. Later, the agility saw minuscule implementation in the years to come, till 2001. It happened when various professionals, practitioners, and theorists came up with “Agile Manifesto”, which was mutually signed and published on the internet. The manifesto challenged the implications of traditionally followed management practices onto the project-related outcomes with a higher level of uncertainties. Further, in addition to declaring the traditional management practices misaligned towards the dynamically natured projects, the report emphasized the induction of agile management practices in such environments. Thus, effectively managing organizational objectives, minimizing project complexity, and delivering efficiency in terms of organizational performance [ 16 , 19 ].

To understand what made the implementation of agile management practices a success in the software industry as well as its spread across the globe on the exponential rate in contrast to any other industry, one has to take into consideration the following factors on which the dynamics of agile management rely onto and further draw a comparison of them with the traditionally followed management practices [ 2 , 20 ] (See Table 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t001

The software industry has for most part evolved over the past 30 years. But the last decade has depicted a significant surge in the industry’s growth and its respective performance. The reason justifying the phenomena has been the broader application of agile management practices, that replaced the traditionally followed management practices over time. The earlier research has justified the execution of agility in terms of ensuring enhanced performance, and also have supported the fact that implementation of agility is most suitable for the business environs that are dynamic in nature. Since, it has very vividly been observed that the implementation of software project development requires the dynamic implementation of operational measures as the problems are evolving real-time, which justifies the complexity associated with the software industry. Considering which, the software development sector is a perfect fit to adapt agile management practices [ 5 ].

Apart from the software products and services, one of the major parts of the project development process is the interaction between the stakeholders which plays a pivotal in determining the performance of the project. Considering which, Uludag, Kleehaus [ 22 ] and Hobbs and Petit [ 23 ] in their respective studies indicated that agile management practices allow organizations for its internal stakeholders to communicate freely as well as maintain a consistent stream of feedback from the external stakeholders. Thus, assuring the regarding organization to achieve optimal performance levels.

Considering the ability of agile management practices to enable its utilizers to accomplish projects in a dynamic environment and be able to deliver optimized performance while considering its respective dimensions i.e., competency, flexibility, quickness, and responsiveness, the current study took into account the implementation of agile management practices in relation to all the aspects of performance.

• H1: Agile management practices will significantly impact the project performance, in a positive manner.

Project complexity.

Any given organization that functions onto various organizational factors either human or non-human operating in parallel to one another, is bound to face unexpected challenges to manage through and accomplish its goals. Considering which, the software industry has been the most critical one on the list [ 24 ]. It has been so because regardless of the business type, every operational entity is reliant on the software utilization either it is in form of communication, logistics, traveling, academia, and even fields as critical as healthcare. Therefore, justifying the software industry to be the one facing crucial levels of complexity [ 25 ].

Typically, for a large-scale operation with a higher magnitude of complexity, like software development, is often considered as a project rather than a routine-based operation/task, by most of the organizations. This demands a persistent application of relevant management practices under effective supervision to tackle the complexity.

For the successful accomplishment of a project, opting relevant management approach plays a pivotal role in tackling the complexities associated with the environment. Since only the right management approach can enable the managers to make correct calculations to allocate the right percentage of resources to the right places at the right time. Moreover, the application of a relevant management approach enables the mitigation of risk and the magnitude of projected losses [ 2 , 26 ].

Prior studies have indicated a directly proportionate relationship between the complexity and the respective performance of an organization and the projects associated with it. This suggests that if the complexities associated with any given project are not handled effectively on time, are probable to cause an escalation in the level of hindrances associated with the project and may even result in failure of the project itself [ 27 , 28 ].

Project complexity attributed to any given project is determined upon the variation in the number of tasks, their respective types, individuals deployed, and numerous other considerations. Considering which, effective prioritization of the entities involved, and the correct allocation of resources is necessary. All of which is only possible through the application of the relevant management approach [ 8 ].

Past decades have seen an evolution in terms of management practices and their respective application. Which have encouraged both academia as well as practitioners to extend the knowledge upon. As a matter of fact, among the two widely practiced project development management approaches i.e. waterfall and agile, it is the agile management approach that has proved itself to be more efficient to accomplish projects, across the world [ 29 ].

Considering which, Zhu and Mostafavi [ 8 ] in their study indicated the ability of agile management practices to manage through complex settings more effectively and efficiently. Thus, suggesting to lead the project towards better performance. Moreover, in another study Maylor and Turner [ 27 ] highlighted the aspect of stakeholder’s involvement in the development process, which justified the mitigation of project complexity to a greater extent. As agile management encourages the internal stakeholders of the project to seek continuous feedback from one another as well as from the clients throughout the process. Doing so reduces the amount of ambiguity from the development phase as much as possible and induce desired changes along the process. Thus, the finished project is much more of a reflection of the client’s expectations and assurance of enhanced performance. Moreover, in specific to the software industry the nature of projects is bound to change much more rapidly than any other industry, which classifies the software industry with the highest level of complexity attributed to it. For its resolution, the agile management approach suggests breaking down of complex scenarios into smaller tasks with reduced complexity. Thus, resulting in the effective and focused application of management practices, which would further result in mitigation of complexity associated with the project as well as elevated project performance [ 18 , 27 ].

Considering, the ability of agile management practices to mitigate the magnitude of complexity associated with the project and enhance the chances of the performance associated to the regarding project accomplish projects in a dynamic environment, the current study took into account the direct implementation of agile management practices in relation to the diminished project complexity. Moreover, the project complexity was evaluated in terms of a mediator.

• H2: Agile management practices will significantly impact the project complexity, in a negative manner.
• H3: Project complexity will significantly impact the project performance, in a negative manner.
• H4: Project complexity will significantly mediate the relationship between agile management practices and project performance.

Leadership competencies.

The opting of management practices is not enough for an organization to function properly. Rather it is the effective implementation of those defined policies that ensure the magnitude of performance delivered and subsequently the overall sustainability of an organization. For which, it is the human factor in terms of leadership, within an organization that contributes the most towards it. This is where leadership and its respective competencies come into play. Andriukaitienė, Voronkova [ 30 ] in their study defined project manager competence as a combination of knowledge (qualification), skills (ability to do a task), and core personality characteristics (motives, traits, self-concepts) that lead to superior results.

In the project management literature, few topics are too frequently discussed yet are very rarely agreed upon; such as the aspect of project performance [ 2 ]. The last two decades have extended the scope of project performance far beyond the measures of cost, time, and functionality. The project performance measures of today demand to fulfill the satisfaction criterion of the stakeholder associated with the given project, attainment of business/organizational goals, product success, and development of the team involved. All of which is very much reliant upon the effectiveness of the implied organizational practice under human supervision [ 31 ]. Refereed to which, Maqbool, Sudong [ 32 ] in their study identified the possible shortcoming that may hinder the performance associated to any given project. The findings identified the hindering effects as the ineffective management practice observed in the planning, organization, and controlling of the project. Furthermore, Alvarenga, Branco [ 33 ] identified various performance measures associated with well-executed projects. Overall, the findings reflected the leadership competency in terms of maintaining effective communication and problem solving resulted in enhanced project performance. While, the absence of leadership competency in terms of inadequate administration/supervision, human skills, and emotional influencing skills (IQ & EQ) resulted in declined performance or even failure in some cases. Ahmed and Anantatmula [ 34 ] in his study suggested that the manager’s perception of performance and belief in his/her ability can play a significant role in determining the performance delivered. Thus, deeming the leadership competency to play a pivotal role in the accomplishment of a project. Akin to which, Turner came up with the seven forces model to define the factors influencing the project’s performance. The model highlights the people as the cardinal force to drive the project towards accomplishment; which is only possible through leadership competencies, teamwork, and industrial relations. Hassan, Bashir [ 35 ] in their studies brought up the subject that despite the vast research on the project performance and its related measures the organizations still fail to satisfy its stakeholders. It was because most of the research done so far was considering time, cost, and quality as the only measure to determine the project performance delivered. Hassan, Bashir [ 35 ] and Maqbool, Sudong [ 32 ] indicated the criticality of including the human factor in terms of leadership competence/ability to determine the performance of the project. Zuo, Zhao [ 36 ] and Gunter [ 37 ] as well in their studies reviewed the impact of leadership’s competence and style to determine the project’s outcomes and concluded the fact that the existing literature has for most part overlooked the impact of leadership competence on the project’s performance. Therefore, to evaluate the controlling effect of leadership competency to observe change in the magnitude of the performance delivered, the current study proposed the following hypothesis (See Fig 1 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.g001

• H5: Leadership competencies will significantly impact the project performance, in a positive manner.
• H6: Leadership competencies will significantly moderate the relationship between project complexity and project performance.

Research methodology

The survey questionnaire was composed of 48 items in total. To determine the application of agile management practices on the organizational level a 20 relevant items were adapted from the scale developed by Zhang and Sharifi [ 42 ]. The scale itself was based upon four dimensions i.e. ability, flexibility, quickness, and responsiveness. To determine the leadership competencies of managers on various hierarchical levels of an organization, an 10 items were adapted from the scale developed by Chung-Herrera, Enz [ 43 ]. The scale was composed of 8 unique dimensions i.e. self-management, strategic positioning, implementation, critical thinking, communication, interpersonal, leadership, and industry knowledge. To determine the overall magnitude of complexity associated with the project under study, 12 items were adapted from the scale developed by Xia and Lee [ 44 ]. To determine the overall performance of the undertaken projects, a 6 items scale developed by Yusuf, Sarhadi [ 45 ] was utilized in the current study. The responses were recorded upon the 5-Point Likert scale, which had (1) to refer to “Strongly Disagree” up to (5) referring to “Strongly Agree” [ 46 ].

The current study included the opinion of the respondents recorded in terms of quantitative scale. During the data collection process, no confidential information (personal/organizational) was inquired about. Also, the presented research did not categorize the involved workers in terms of race/ethnicity, age, disease/disabilities, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, or other socially constructed groupings. Therefore, COMSATS University Islamabad’s Ethics Review Committee declared the current study exempted from the requirement of consent from the respondents. Considering which, a total of 250 questionnaires were disseminated to survey the professionals of the Pakistani IT industry. By the end of the survey process, a total of 190 responses got collected. Thus, the overall response rate of the study was 76%. Further, 7% of the responses were discarded as a result of being incomplete or erroneous. Since both incomplete or redundant data can affect the results adversely [ 47 ]. Followed to the collection of data the next phase demanded the application of appropriate statistical tools and respective data analysis techniques to make deductions regarding the objectives of the study. For which the current study utilized the SmartPLS GmbH’s SMART Partial Least Squares (SMART PLS 3.0) to analyze the dataset. Various studies in recent years have utilized a similar tool and respective techniques to analyze the data and make respective deductions [ 48 , 49 ].

Statistical results & analysis

To begin with, the information was gauged to assess the instrument’s reliability and validity. Further, the instrument’s fitness was evaluated in terms of factor loadings. The results identified few unfit components associated with the variables under study. Suggested to which, the identified unfit components of the hypothesized model were then removed. Followed by which, the information was evaluated to gauge the direct and indirect effects of variables, in alignment with the hypothesized model. Finally, the hypothesized model was concluded upon the evaluation of the total impact of the predictor variables upon the dependent variable [ 50 , 51 ].

Demographical classification

The respondents of the study had variating attributions associated with them in terms of demographics. The current study classified the respondents in terms of age, tenure of employment, sector of employment, the status of employment, and the geographical location of their organization.

As a response to which 63.6 percent of employees were aged between 20–29 years, 21.6 percent were aged between 30–39 years, 10.8 percent were aged between 40–49 years and 4.0 percent were aged 50 years or above.

In specific to the tenure of employment or the managerial experience, 27.8 percent of respondents had an experience of less than 1 year, 20.5 percent had experience ranged between 1–2 years, 19.3 percent had experience ranged between 2–5 years, 9.1 percent had experience ranged between 5–10 years and, 23.3 percent had an experience of 10 years or over.

In terms of the employment sector, 53.9 percent of the individuals were employed in the public sector. While 46.1 percent of the individuals were employed in the private sector.

In terms of the geographical placement of the surveyed organizations, 12.5 percent of the firm were deployed in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit Baltistan, 50 percent of the firm were deployed in Punjab, 25 percent of the firm were deployed in the Sindh and, 12.5 percent of the firm were deployed in the Balochistan. Thus, deeming the study to utilize the equivalently proportionate responses from each province, that were aligned with the proportion of firms in each province, nationwide.

Structural equation modeling

Structural equation modeling is a multivariate based statistical evaluation approach that is utilized to determine structural associations between the components of a hypothesized model [ 52 , 53 ]. The adapted approach is a combination of factor analysis and multiple- regression analysis. The current study took a two-stage approach to conduct SEM. The first stage involved the application of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which justified the consistency of the research instrument and its associated components/items. Followed by which, the research instrument was tested for its respective reliability and validity in the first stage of SEM, as commended by prior research [ 53 ]. The second stage of SEM involved the evaluation of measuring the magnitude of impact existent between the observed and latent variables under discussion. Which were further justifies in terms of their significance and their respective relevance in alignment to the hypothesized relationships [ 54 ].

SEM (stage 1).

To begin with, the first stage of the SEM tested the measurement model for its reliability, validity (convergent, discriminant), and consistency to the components towards the research instrument, utilizing the CFA approach. CFA is a commended approach to test adapted research instruments for their consistency [ 49 , 55 ].

Instrument’s reliability.

The reliability of a research instrument is its ability to give consistent results with negligible variation regardless of the environment it is utilized in. SEM utilizes Cronbach’s Alpha as the criterion of reliability associated with a research instrument. For a research instrument and its respective components to be reliable the value of Cronbach’s Alpha is commended to be higher than 0.70 [ 56 ]. Keeping that in view, the values of Cronbach’s Alpha associated with all the variables under study were above 0.70 (See Table 2 ). Thus, deeming the respective research instrument to be reliable.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t002

Instrument’s validity (convergent).

The validity of a research instrument is defined as its ability to measure the phenomena that it is supposed to measure. There are two types of validity i.e. convergent and discriminant [ 57 , 58 ]. The convergent validity associated with a research instrument is the measure to determine the relatability of research items to their respective variable. SEM utilizes Average Variance Extracted (AVE) as the criterion of validity associated with a research instrument. For a research instrument and its respective components to be convergently valid, the value of AVE is commended to be higher than 0.5 [ 49 , 59 ]. Keeping, that in view the values of AVE associated with all the variables under study were above 0.5 (See Table 3 ). Thus, deeming the respective research instrument to be convergently valid.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t003

Instrument’s validity (discriminant).

The discriminant validity associated with a research instrument is the measure to determine the magnitude of dissimilarity of research items associated with a variable towards the research items of the rest of the variables under study. SEM utilizes Fornell-Larcker Criterion as the criterion of discriminant validity associated with a research instrument. For a research instrument and its respective components to be discriminately valid, the correlative value of Fornell-Larcker Criterion of a variable with its components is commended to be higher than the correlative value of other variables in the study [ 48 , 49 ]. Keeping, that in view the values of the Fornell-Larcker Criterion associated with all the variables under study were comparatively higher than the correlative values of other variables in the study (See Table 4 ). Thus, deeming the respective research instrument to be discriminately valid.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t004

Another measure to determine, the discriminant validity associated to a research instrument is the Cross Loadings. For a research instrument and its respective components to be discriminately valid, the correlative values of Cross Loadings of the items of a variable are commended to be higher than the correlative values of similar items with other variables in the study [ 49 ]. Keeping, that in view the values of Cross Loadings associated to all the items of the variables under study were comparatively higher than the correlative values of similar items with rest of the variables in the study (See Table 5 ). Thus, deeming the respective research instrument to be discriminately valid.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t005

Lastly, in terms of evaluating the discriminant validity, the Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio (HTMT) is considered as the most precise measurement. HTMT is based upon a higher level of specificity that is ranged between the measurement precision of 97%-99%. On the contrary, the measures of Cross Loadings followed by the Fornell-Larcker Criterion can only depict a measurement precision ranged between 0.00%-20.82% [ 49 , 60 ]. In terms of HTMT, for a research instrument to be valid, the correlational terms must be valued lower than the 0.90. Keeping that in view, the correlation values associated with all the variables were below 0.90 (See Table 6 ). Thus, deeming the respective research instrument to be discriminately valid.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t006

Multi-collinearity.

Multi-Collinearity is the state of higher correlation existent between the variables and the indicators associated with them. Which can further lead to unreliable statistical projections and inferences. To test a variable and its respective indicators for collinearity, the proposed criterion of VIF is followed. The referred criterion suggests for all the indicators of the regarding variable to have a VIF value lower than 5 to be fit in terms of collinearity measure [ 48 ]. Keeping that in view all the indicators associated with the variables under study were found to have VIF value under 5 (See Table 7 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t007

Factor loadings.

Followed to fulfilling the criterion of the research instrument’s reliability and validity the respective components must fulfill the criterion of factor analysis that is measured in terms of Factor Loadings. Factor Loadings are determinant of the variability and correlation associated with the items of the observed variables under study. For an item associated with a variable to fulfill the Factor Loading criterion, must be valued above 0.7 [ 61 , 62 ]. In comparison to which, selective items associated with agile management (AM13) and project complexity (PC2, PC4) were found below the commended threshold value (See Table 8 ). Thus, these items were removed from the measurement model, to enhance the overall fit.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t008

SEM (stage 2).

After the deletion of unfit components of the measurement model, the second stage involved the reassessment of the measurement model. The model was retested in terms of Factor Loadings, which depicted all of the values to be ranged above the minimum threshold of 0.70 [ 62 ] (See Table 9 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t009

Path coefficients.

After conforming to the component fitness criterion, the structural model was evaluated in terms of the magnitude of the effect the observed variables had on the latent variables. The said magnitude was evaluated utilizing the measure of Path Coefficients. The value associated to the measure of path coefficient varies between ±1, which suggests the positive and negative relationship between the variables under consideration [ 48 , 63 , 64 ]. The effect of agile management practices over the project performance was valued at 0.473. The effect of agile management practices over the project complexity was valued as 0.703. The effect of leadership competencies over the project performance was valued at 0.664. Lastly, the effect of project complexity over the project performance was valued at 0.149. The evaluated effects were further justified in terms of the level of significance attributed to them i.e. p-value ≤ 0.05. Since all the results fulfilled the significance criterion, for which the evaluated effects were considered as accepted (See Table 10 ). Thus, justifying the following hypothesized relationships between the variables under study:

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t010

Coefficient of determination ( r 2 ).

Coefficient of Determination ( r 2 ) is representative of the amount of variance the exogenous variable/s can cause in the associated endogenous variable/s. The value of the Coefficient of Determination (r2) varies between 0–1. The higher the value of r 2 the higher the magnitude of impact implied by the exogenous variables [ 65 ]. Keeping that in view, the exogenous variables of the study i.e. (Agile Management, Project Complexity, and Leadership Competencies) impacted the endogenous variable i.e. (Project Performance) with an r 2 valued at 0.582. Thus, justifying 58.20% of the variance explained (See Table 11 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t011

Effect size ( f 2 ).

Effect Size ( f 2 ) is representative of the magnitude of effect an exogenous variable can have on an endogenous variable. The respective magnitude of the effect is classified into three tiers. For a given relationship the values of Effect Size ( f 2 ) ranged between 0.02–0.14 are attributed as a small effect. Likewise, values ranged between 0.15–0.35 are attributed as a medium effect, and values ranged 0.36 and above are attributed as a large effect [ 48 , 51 ]. Keeping that in view, both the agile management and project complexity had a medium impact. While leadership competencies and project complexity had a large effect on their respective dependent variables. (See Table 12 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t012

Mediation analysis.

A mediatory variable of the study is known to add an explanation or justify the effect of an exogenous variable over an endogenous variable. The current study took project complexity as a mediator to explain the effect of agile management over the project performance. SmartPLS explains the mediation in terms of Indirect Effects and its respective significance [ 66 , 67 ]. Keeping, that in view the hypothesized mediation was approved (See Table 13 ). Thus, accepting the following hypothesis:

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t013

Moderation analysis.

A moderating variable of the study is known to control the magnitude of the effect of an exogenous variable over an endogenous variable. This effect can be tilted either positively or negatively in presence of a moderator. The current study took leadership competencies as a moderator to control the effect of project complexity over the project performance. SmartPLS explains the moderation in terms of inducing a product indicator term in the structural model and its respective significance [ 68 ]. Keeping, that in view the hypothesized moderation was approved (See Table 14 ). Thus, accepting the following hypothesis:

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t014

Results summary.

The proposed hypotheses for the current study were accepted while considering their significance. The respective summary is depicted in the following Table 15 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.t015

To begin with, the first research hypothesis stated, “Are the agile management practices a significant predictor of project performance?”. Keeping that in view, the current study depicted a significantly positive influence of implementing agile management practices onto the overall performance of the projects undertaken. This suggests, that resolving a project into smaller functional proportions and responding timely is a commendable approach to enhance the performance of the undertaken projects.

Furthermore, the statistical findings in accordance with the dimensions of the agile management the significance of the relationship emphasized that an organization must undertake only the projects that it is competent enough to accomplish. Moreover, for a project that is undertaken, must be resolved down to work units that can be matched with the competency level of the employed individual. This would enable them to achieve the targeted goals with fewer hurdles faced along the process. Similar results were concluded by Alvarenga, Branco [ 33 ] in their study conducted on 257 project managers; each having an extensive experience of over 10 years. As it was indicated that it is the competency associated to the employed individuals in an organization that assures the efficient and effective execution of organizational task and result in accomplishment of the undertaken projects. Followed to which, agile management commends the adaption of flexibility in the project development process that allows the project team to incorporate the changes more easily than the traditional implementation of the projects. Similarly, the loss incurred during the development process is relatively less. Since the failure is often observed in one or a few modules at a time, which doesn’t affect the rest of the development process in any way. Most importantly, agile management is most responsible for responding quickly to the areas of projects that demand prioritized completion or technical handling. The respective findings were found in alignment to the study conducted by Serrador and Pinto [ 5 ] on 1002 projects deployed across various nations, that depicted a similar notion of a positive impact of implementing agile management to attain enhanced organizational outcomes. In another mixed-mode study conducted by Drury-Grogan [ 69 ] on various teams utilizing agile tools in the I.T sector as well suggested that application of the referred tools resulted in enhancing the success associated with the regarding projects.

The second research hypothesis stated, “Are the agile management practices a significant predictor of project-related complexities?” Keeping that in view, the current study depicted a significantly negative influence of implementing agile management on the project complexity. This suggests that the implementation of agile management enabled the regarding project managers to be able to effectively foresee the undertaken projects to a greater extent by adapting agile management practices than they would otherwise have had by adapting traditional management practices. The respective findings were found in alignment with the study conducted by Sohi, Hertogh [ 9 ] on 67 projects of complex nature, depicted that in a hybrid system with agile management practices coupled with traditional management approach was able to mitigate the magnitude of complexity faced by the regarding firms. In another subjective study conducted by Maylor and Turner [ 7 ] projected deduction being based upon 43 workshops and the opinion of 1100 managers. The results suggested an agile management approach as possibly the most effective approach to diminish the project complexity to commendable levels. Akin to which, in an extensive literature review conducted by Bergmann and Karwowski [ 70 ] also concluded the similar findings that adaptation of agile management is very effective in terms of mitigating the project related complexities and a accomplishing project outcomes.

The third research hypothesis stated, “Is the project complexity a significant predictor of project performance?” Keeping that in view, the current study depicted a significantly negative influence of project complexity on the overall performance of the projects. This suggests that the uncertainties faced by the project manager may hinder the accomplishment of the project. This would further possibly result in causing unnecessary delays, financial losses, overused employee efforts, working environment with moral, quality compromises, and unsatisfied clients. The respective findings were found in alignment with the study conducted by Floricel, Michela [ 71 ] on 81 projects deployed 5 across continents, depicted the possible negative impact of complexities on the overall performance of the organizations; that may be faced at each step of the development process. In another hybrid study conducted by Zhu and Mostafavi [ 8 ] on various senior project managers employed in the construction sector as well opinionated that complexities associated with organizations can deter the performance observed across their respective projects. Likewise, Luo, He [ 72 ] compile the opinion of 245 project managers that expressed the fact that project complexity can jeopardize the accomplishment of desired organizational outcomes. Therefore, their mitigation is a necessity for an organization to thrive.

The fourth research hypothesis stated, “Are leadership competencies a significant predictor of project performance?” Keeping that in view, the current study depicted a significant relationship between leadership competencies and project performance. This suggests that effective leadership can play a pivotal role in enabling an organization to attain the desired performance targets associated to its respective project. The respective findings were found in alignment to the study conducted by Ahmed and Anantatmula [ 34 ] on 286 project managers serving various construction firms in Pakistan, suggested leadership competencies be an effective measure to enhance the performance of the projects it is utilized onto. In another hybrid study conducted by Berssaneti and Carvalho [ 73 ] on 336 project managers deployed across various Brazilian firms opinionated that effective supervision and managerial support can prove itself to be a potential factor in enabling a firm to deliver desired outcomes.

The fifth research hypothesis stated, “Does the project complexity mediate the relationship between agile management practices and project performance?” Keeping that in view, the current study depicted a significant relationship between agile management and project performance while considering leadership competencies as a moderator. This suggests that effective implementation of agile management practices in a project can prove themselves to be effective in elevating project performance. Though the magnitude of complexity associated with the project can explain the possible decline observed in project performance; regardless of the management practices being observed. Though the observed decline can be minimized to a laudable extent through the utilization of agile management practices. The respective findings were found in alignment with an in-depth correlational study conducted by Sohi, Hertogh [ 9 ] on 67 project managers supervising various projects. The results suggested that inducing agile management practices within any compatible system can enable an organization to manage through its professional challenges which can possibly lead an organization to perform better.

The sixth research hypothesis stated, “Do the leadership competencies moderate the relationship between agile management practices and project performance?” Keeping that in view, the current study depicted a significant relationship between project complexity and project performance while considering leadership competencies as a moderator. Which suggests that effective implication of human factor in terms of leadership competencies can play a vital role in mitigating the hindrances faced during the project development process and can further result in enhanced performance. On the contrary, the absence of required leadership competencies can result in augmentation of adversities that may lead to a decline in the project performance. The respective findings were found in alignment to a mixed-mode study conducted by Aurélio de Oliveira, Veriano Oliveira Dalla Valentina [ 74 ] on 32 highly skilled and influential project managers in the field of R&D; who have served various forms globally. The correlational study depicted a possibly potential impact of an appropriate leadership approach to resolve organizational situations and deliver targeted performance.

Considering the hypothetical contemplations of the current study, various deductions have been made. To begin with, the implementation of agile management practices in the Pakistani I.T industry proves itself to be effective in terms of enhancing the overall performance of the undertaken projects. Thus, ensuring the sustainability of organizations in the industry. Moreover, it was observed that agile management practices enabled its utilizers to cope up with the complexities, by breaking down tasks into smaller work units and implementing the supervision on a horizontal scale rather than top-down. This approach not only made managing tasks effectively and efficiently but also made the decision making swift. Though it was observed that the organizations that weren’t able to take on the implementation of agile management practices on a full scale, faced complexities in various organizational terms, that would lead to declined performance. In addition to the mitigation of complexities through the implementation of agile management practices, it was the effective consideration of human factors in terms of leadership competencies that extended the reduction of organizational complexities and upscaled the magnitude of performance delivered.

The current study offers a pathway to understanding the application of agile management practices in the IT sector. Though it faces various shortcomings in both contextual and conceptual manner, which can further serve as a pathway to future researchers and professionals to look into and extend the knowledge pool.

In conceptual terms, the current study only took into account one mediatory variable i.e., project complexity to explain the implications of agile management onto the project performance. Akin to which, only one moderating variable was considered to evaluate the variability in the magnitude of project performance. Both of these are not enough of a consideration to depict the full potential of application of agile management practices in determining the project performance. Referred to which, it is commended for the future researchers and professionals to look into considering other variables that can explain the phenomena of agile management to variate the magnitude of project performance delivered. In alignment to which, it will also be interesting to see the implementation of agile management to enhance the organizational accomplishments such as, attaining competitive advantage, innovation, industrial sustainability, and more.

In contextual terms, the current study has targeted the IT sector of Pakistan; a developing nation. Since other industries as well are realizing the necessity of agile management and embracing its practices, it will be interesting to see the application of similar study in other developing nations, as well as other industrial sectors.

Supporting information

S1 appendix..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.s001

S1 Dataset.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249311.s002

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Project management: Recent developments and research opportunities

• Published: 16 June 2012
• Volume 21 , pages 129–143, ( 2012 )

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This paper studies the business process known as project management. This process has exhibited a remarkable growth in business interest over the last 15 years, as demonstrated by a 1000% increase in membership in the Project Management Institute since 1996. This growth is largely attributable to the emergence of many new diverse business applications that can be successfully managed as projects. The new applications for project management include IT implementations, research and development, new product and service development, corporate change management, and software development. The characteristics of modern projects are typically very different from those of traditional projects such as construction and engineering, which necessitates the development of new project management techniques. We discuss these recent practical developments. The history of project management methodology is reviewed, from CPM and PERT to the influential modern directions of critical chain project management and agile methods. We identify one important application area for future methodological change as new product and service development. A list of specific research topics within project management is discussed. The conclusions suggest the existence of significant research opportunities within project management.

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Nicholas G. Hall is Professor of Management Sciences in the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. He holds B.A., M.A. degrees in economics from the University of Cambridge, a professional qualification in accounting, and a Ph.D. (1986) from the University of California at Berkeley. His main research interests are in tactical operations issues, especially project management, scheduling and pricing, public policy and sports management problems. He is the author of over 70 refereed publications, and has given over 260 academic presentations, including 88 invited presentations in 20 countries, 6 conference keynote presentations and 6 INFORMS tutorials. A 2008 citation study ranked him 13th among 1,376 scholars in the operations management field. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Decision Making under Uncertainty of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He won the Faculty Outstanding Research Award of the Fisher College of Business in 1998 and 2005.

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Software project management tools in global software development: a systematic mapping study

• Saad Yasser Chadli 1 ,
• Ali Idri 1 ,
• Joaquín Nicolás Ros 2 ,
• José Luis Fernández-Alemán 2 ,
• Juan M. Carrillo de Gea 2 &
• Ambrosio Toval 2  

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Global software development (GSD) which is a growing trend in the software industry is characterized by a highly distributed environment. Performing software project management (SPM) in such conditions implies the need to overcome new limitations resulting from cultural, temporal and geographic separation. The aim of this research is to discover and classify the various tools mentioned in literature that provide GSD project managers with support and to identify in what way they support group interaction. A systematic mapping study has been performed by means of automatic searches in five sources. We have then synthesized the data extracted and presented the results of this study. A total of 102 tools were identified as being used in SPM activities in GSD. We have classified these tools, according to the software life cycle process on which they focus and how they support the 3C collaboration model (communication, coordination and cooperation). The majority of the tools found are standalone tools (77%). A small number of platforms (8%) also offer a set of interacting tools that cover the software development lifecycle. Results also indicate that SPM areas in GSD are not adequately supported by corresponding tools and deserve more attention from tool builders.

Globalization as an economic and social trend has relentlessly pushed businesses to turn from national markets toward a global market in which new forms of concurrence and cooperation have been spawned. In the last decade, software development in particular has undergone a drastic change in its business operations and processes. This concerns not only marketing and distribution but also the way in which software is conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers (Herbsleb and Moitra 2001 ). In particular, global software development (GSD) is now an expanding trend in the software industry (Santos et al. 2012 ) owing to the advantages that it may have over collocated software development (Conchúir et al. 2006 , 2009 ). It helps software companies access highly qualified resources at a lower cost, provides them with easier access to customers and allows 24/7 work shifts. However, it also adds new challenges to the management of the already complex software projects (da Silva et al. 2010 ). The geographic separation of teams, the social and cultural differences among people, along with time zone differences, greatly impact on communication and collaboration and limit the success of projects in a highly distributed environment (Steinmacher et al. 2013 ; Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ).

Research on GSD has increased since it is becoming an effective technique (Haq et al. 2011 ) and existing descriptions of the software project management (SPM) field (PMI 2004 ; Abran et al. 2001 ) do not consider globalization explicitly. This has therefore led to a new need to study and assess the downsides of GSD in SPM and to provide new methods, techniques and tools with which to alleviate them. As a result, industry has adopted both existing and new tools to deal with GSD. These tools have features that make them suitable as regards reducing temporal, geographic and socio-cultural distance (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 ).

Lanubile et al. ( 2013 ) published a survey on the key technologies and tools that support group awareness and collaboration in GSD projects. The systematic literature review (SLR) by da Silva et al. ( 2010 ) collected 30 challenges regarding SPM in distributed software development from 54 studies published between 1998 and 2009. Jiménez et al. ( 2009 ) identified ten challenges and proposed a continuous improvement model to counter these challenges. In these two studies, a lack of group awareness, communication, coordination and collaboration are considered to be key factors in the complexity of SPM activities in a highly distributed context. Research is still ongoing to discover factors weighing in the failure of GSD projects. Two studies conducted in 2016 (Niazi et al. 2016a , b ) aim to identify challenges that might undermine the success of such projects. These studies were carried out by the means of an SLR and were validated using data retrieved from questionnaire based survey. Their results indicate that GSD projects still suffer from a lack of communication and coordination between stakeholders.

In this paper we report a systematic mapping study (SMS) on the tools used for SPM in the context of GSD. Its purpose is to identify these tools, to classify them using an international standard [ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 “Systems & Software Engineering—Software Lifecycle Process” ( 2008 )] and to show how they support practitioners’ activities. The information provided by this study includes a list of tools and their attributes, such as: License type, technology type (framework, stand alone tool, plug-in \(\ldots \) ) and whether they foster communication, coordination and cooperation between different stakeholders. This may prove useful for software project managers who have to deal with a distributed environment, helping them choose between the variety of tools that are intended to support their activities. Both tool builders and researchers can also identify prominent publication sources for relevant studies and areas of SPM in which the least number of tools is available, thus paving the way for the development of new tools.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: “ Related work ” section identifies related work concerning the topic of the SMS. “ Mapping process ” section presents the systematic mapping, including its planning, conduction and analysis. In “ Results and discussion ” section, the results and findings of the study are shown and discussed and the implications for researchers and practitioners are then described. “ Threats to validity ” section states the limitations of the review. Finally, “ Conclusions and future work ” section presents the conclusions of this SMS and possible future work.

Related work

Early research on the subject was conducted by da Silva et al. ( 2010 ) in an SLR carried out in 2010, in which researchers were able to list 24 tools intended for SPM use in a highly distributed environment. The goal of this study was to identify the challenges confronted by project managers in this context, best practices that overcome these difficulties and both the tools and models that support these practices. An evidence-based project management improvement model was ultimately presented. This model aims to provide practitioners and researchers with support as regards attaining a better understanding of the landscape of GSD project challenges and devise more effective solutions to improve project management in a distributed setting. In the same year, Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2010 ) published a survey of 35 tools classified with the use of the processes presented in the ISO/IEC 12207 standard ( 2008 ). A matching between these tools, their features and the distance factor they reduce was presented.

In an SMS published in 2012, Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2012 ) collected 132 tools intended for use in the GSD realm and classified them by considering the areas defined in the SWEBOK (Abran et al. 2001 ). According to their study, 21 tools are used to engineer project management, while the others are more oriented toward the technical process of software development. The same authors also presented a list of empirically validated tools, one of their findings regarding this question being that only 25.8% of the tools listed in their study have been evaluated in a distributed environment.

Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) tackle the same subject as (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ) more extensively and classify the tools using various categorizations. In their mapping study, they were able to identify and classify 412 tools intended for the GSD domain extracted from a set of 182 primary studies. The researchers used three classifications schemes, the first being the technology type of the tools, the second being which of the 3C (communication, coordination, cooperation) collaboration model dimensions are supported and the last being which of the software development activities, the tool intends to support. The 3C collaboration model has been proposed by Ellis et al. ( 1991 ) and adopted by Fuks et al. ( 2008 ). It advocates the analysis, representation, and development of groupware by means of the interplay between the 3Cs, namely, Communication, Coordination, and Cooperation. The model became widely accepted for analyzing tools employed to support computer-mediated interactions (Tell and Ali Babar 2012 ) and has also been used as a classification scheme in this SMS.

Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2010 ) and Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) both published a set of tools intended for GSD use as part of an SMS study. These two studies were conducted at nearly the same time while researchers were unaware of the other study for most of their research and can give a useful insight on how the method used can alter the results. The study from Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) offers a list of 412 tools while the study from Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2010 ) offers a list of only 132. Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) aware at the end of the other study discuss these differences and claim it to be essentially due to the search terms used and digital libraries queried. Another difference is that some tools have been classified differently in these studies. These tiny differences occurred not only because they used different classification methods but also because they attributed each tool to a unique class while some tools tend to have more than just one use and can be attributed as such to different classes. Associating each tool to a unique class can hinder the preciseness of the results produced and has been avoided in this SMS.

To the best of our knowledge, no systematic mapping or review of the tools available in GSD has been performed to date with a focus on SPM activities and processes. As stated above, da Silva et al. ( 2010 ) proposed a model for SPM in a GSD context, but they did not focus on the tools used nor classify them according to a widely known standard. Furthermore, although Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2012 ) and Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) present exhaustive lists of the GSD tools that are available, in these studies, project management solely comprises project planning, while other areas such as knowledge management and configuration are not considered as part of engineering project management. In this study, we aim to aggregate and update lists of tools used in GSD, provided by selected secondary studies, while focusing on SPM processes.

Mapping process

SMSs are designed to provide a classified scheme of a broad research area, and to categorize existing research evidence on a topic and its subsequent results. These results can identify gaps in research, and an SLR can then be used to study these gaps in greater depth. In this section, the research questions (RQs) of this study are first laid down and the search string used to query the digital libraries is constructed based on the PICO method. Afterwards, digital libraries used are specified, Inclusion and Exclusion criteria are defined and a quality assessment method is established. Finally the data extraction method is indicated for each RQ. The protocol of this SMS is based on the recommendations of Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ), and the method used is presented in the following subsections.

Research questions

The RQs aim to classify the tools available in terms of features and type and to assess their use in the software industry. The RQs and their motivations are displayed in Table  1 .

For the purpose of this study, SPM is defined as the project processes of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 “Systems and Software Engineering—Software Lifecycle Process” ( 2008 ). Project processes include project management processes that are used to establish and evolve project plans, to assess actual achievement and progress against the plans and to control execution of the project through to fulfillment, along with project support processes that support specialized management ( 2008 ). Individual processes are defined in “ Data extraction and synthesis ” section—RQ6.

Search strategy

In order to answer the RQs, a search was conducted using a search string composed of keywords relevant to this study and applied to a number of academic electronic libraries and search engines.

Search string

Following the guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ) using the PICO method (population, intervention, comparison, outcome), the keywords initially identified from the RQs are:

Population: Global software development .

Intervention: Software project management .

Outcome: Tool .

Comparison is not relevant in this study, since it is an exploratory study. The Intervention keyword has proven to be limiting the group of studies targeted by this SMS. The reason being that most papers do not talk specifically about SPM but rather SPM processes (e.g. planning, version control), consequently, the intervention keyword has been dropped.

The search terms that have similar meanings are organized into groups. Combined terms are obtained using the OR logical operator between search terms in the same group. The final search string is obtained using the AND logical operator between combined terms of different groups. The search string used is: [(global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE] AND (tool OR technology).

The search terms used have been inspired from similar research (da Silva et al. 2010 ; Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ) and the authors suggestions.

Literature resources

Automatic searches using the specified search string has been performed in the following digital databases in January 2015:

Digital libraries

IEEE Xplore ( 2016 ).

ScienceDirect ( 2016 ).

Association for computing machinery (ACM) ( 2016 ).

Digital search engines

Google Scholar ( 2016 ).

Digital bibliography and library project (DBLP) ( 2016 ).

The digital libraries used in this SMS have been selected by using previous SLRs and SMSs in the same field and with a similar scope as a basis. In studies (da Silva et al. 2010 ; Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ; Jiménez et al. 2009 ; Costa et al. 2010 ), researchers have unfailingly used IEEE Xplore, ACM and ScienceDirect libraries and the studies selected from these digital libraries represent 79, 92, 83 and 80% respectively of the total number of studies selected in each review. Two additional search engines (Google Scholar and DBLP) were also used in order to include more results.

The impossibility of performing the search in all the digital databases and search engines using the same method signified that a specific configuration of the search string was used with each search engine. Command search queries used in each digital library and search engine is available in Appendix 3 .

Study selection procedure

Candidate studies from the automated searches were reviewed by two authors separately, who were asked to determine the relevancy of papers based on their title and abstract. A paper was accepted if both researchers agreed that the study was relevant; it was refused if both researchers agreed that the paper was irrelevant. Those papers upon which the researchers could not reach an agreement were reviewed in a second phase, during which the researchers resolved their disagreements in a meeting in which they exchanged their ideas on the content of the papers and their relevancy after studying the full text of the article.

In the case of a journal article extending a conference paper, both papers are selected as long as they pass the selection procedure. During the study selection procedure, relevant studies were identified using the inclusion and exclusion criteria cited here after:

Inclusion criteria

The paper studied one or several tools that support SPM activities in a GSD context.

Exclusion criteria

The paper studied SPM techniques (without tools) used in GSD.

The paper was a workshop summary.

Paper was not in English.

The exclusion criteria were applied using “OR” logical operator between them.

Tool identification and classification procedure

Although some tools can be thought not to be related to this research, further investigation of their use in industry and their features proved otherwise. A tool like “Eclipse help system” is primarily a help system for an IDE and would commonly be considered to be outside of this research’s scope. Nonetheless, it allows users to create and modify project documentation, which can then be used by other stakeholders. This feature allows knowledge to be created and shared. This tool can then be included in the group of tools that support the IM process. “Social software” can also be a source of confusion as they are frequently used inside and outside work context, but recent studies indicate that tools such as Skype, Twitter, etc., have been widely used in the GSD industry to provide additional communication channels (Niazi et al. 2015 ; Giuffrida and Dittrich 2013 ).

Information necessary to classify the tools was retrieved primarily from the selected studies. In case information is incomplete or missing, it was retrieved from the tool builder website or generic information on the Internet. The first author was tasked with classifying the tools using available information, the remaining authors were tasked with reviewing each a section of the final list of tools in order to cover the whole list. In case of a disagreement, the authors held a meeting where they exchanged their ideas based on viable information until an agreement was reached.

Quality assessment process

Each of the primary studies selected was assessed to ascertain its quality using four criteria inspired by previous studies (Ouhbi et al. 2015 ; Fernandez et al. 2011 ):

QA1 The main focus of the study is SPM tools used in a GSD context (yes +1/partially +0).

Some papers may present a discussion about our research subject but only in a secondary manner, while the main topic of the paper is different. We consider that these papers are not as interesting for our SMS as those which are entirely dedicated to discussing SPM tools in a GSD context.

QA2 The study explicitly presents tools with which to support GSD project management activity (yes +1/no +0).

Some papers may only present guidelines or recommendations as to how to use or develop tools. These papers might be interesting for our discussion but our main research goal is to list all available tools. The paper achieves the full score if a new tool is presented or an existing tool is assessed.

QA3 The study uses empirical results for argumentation (yes +1/no +0). The results and conclusions of the study are strengthened by empirical evidence and it provides important and reliable information about future research and practice (Šmite et al. 2010 ).

QA4 The study has been published in a recognized and stable publication source. This rating is based on the 2013 journal citations report (JCR) ( 2013 ) for journals and the computer science conference ranking in Computing Research and Education (CORE) 2013 Conference Rankings ( 2013 ).

Conf: (CORE A* +2/CORE A +1.5/CORE B +1/CORE C +0.5).

Journal: (Q1 +2/Q2 +1.5/Q3 +1/Q4 +0.5).

No ranking: +0.

JCR uses the impact factor to rank journals by their field of interest. Those ranked in the first quartile are called Q1 journals. Those in the second, third and last are respectively called Q2, Q3, Q4 journals. CORE2013 uses the following ranking categories, derived primarily from earlier CORE ranking exercises: CORE A* (flagship conference), CORE A (excellent conference), CORE B (good conference), CORE C (other ranked conference).

Although there is a general opinion that journal papers are better than conference papers, Bowyer ( 2012 ) is the opinion that conferences and journals are different by nature and cannot be compared; we also agree with this statement, since both contribute to the dissemination of knowledge in their own way. The quality classification scheme of the selected studies is based on a global unsupervised discretization method (Dougherty et al. 1995 ), a variation of the equal width interval binning in which the upper and lower bins are shorter than others with the intention of discriminating between extreme scores. The classification scheme is presented in Table  2 .

Data extraction and synthesis

The data needed to answer the RQs in Table  1 were extracted by exploring the full text of each selected article. A spreadsheet was used to store the data concerning each article whose structure is presented in Table  3 . Another spreadsheet was used to extract data concerning tools, which is presented in Table  4 . The strategy is hereafter explained for each RQ:

RQ1 The publication source and channel for each paper is listed and the aggregated results will be presented.

RQ2 The publication year for each paper is listed, and the aggregated result will provide an overview of the number of related articles per year.

RQ3 The research type for each paper is classified into one of the following categories (Brereton et al. 2007 ):

Evaluation research Existing SPM tools are implemented in a GSD context and an evaluation or a validation of these tools is conducted.

Solution proposal An SPM tool designed for GSD is proposed. This solution may be a new tool or a significant extension of an existing tool. The potential benefits and the applicability of the solution could be shown with an empirical study or a good argumentation.

Review An analysis of existing literature concerning SPM tools in a GSD context.

Other Any other research type not listed above (e.g. experience report, opinion paper, etc.).

RQ4 The research approach for each paper is classified into one of the following categories (Condori-Fernandez et al. 2009 ):

Case study An empirical inquiry that investigates a tool within its real-life context.

Survey A method for collecting quantitative information concerning a tool (e.g. a questionnaire).

Experiment An empirical method applied under controlled conditions.

Non empirical Non empirical research approaches or a theoretical evaluation of a tool.

Other Any approach not listed above.

RQ5 Each of the tools proposed or reviewed in any of the selected papers is listed in order to create an exhaustive set of the tools proposed for SPM activity in literature. We have differentiated between the technologies by adopting the classification proposed in Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ):

Standalone tool (SAT) an independent software application fulfilling a specific design intent.

Framework a “semi-complete” application that provides an integrated set of domain-specific structures and functionality.

Environment a development environment that comprises a set of processes and programming tools used to create software products. Moreover, an integrated development environment is a subset of this group, which identifies a development environment that has a unified interface.

Platform a set of generic components that form a common structure, from which a set of derivative products can be developed.

Plug-in a software component that interacts with an existing software application through the use of well defined application programming interfaces (APIs), often designed to enhance it by adding new functionalities.

RQ5 also aims to classify tools on the basis of their type of license, and we have adopted the classification used in Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2012 ):

Commercial Tools whose license can be obtained by means of payment, although a free trial period may be offered.

Free Tools whose license can be obtained without payment. In this license type we include licenses such as Apache License, general public license (GPL), etc.

Research Tools or prototypes developed by research groups which are not freely or commercially available.

RQ6 We have adopted the ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 “Systems and Software Engineering—Software Lifecycle Process” standard for the classification of the activities related to SPM. The classification of the listed tools will be based on the project processes of ( 2016 ). A tool may therefore be focused on one or more SPM processes. The processes have been defined on the basisof ( 2016 ):

Project planning (PP) The purpose of the PP process is to produce and communicate effective and workable project plans. This process determines the scope of the project management and technical activities, identifies process outputs, project tasks and deliverables, establishes schedules during which the project task will be conducted, including achievement criteria, and states which resources are required to accomplish project tasks.

Project assessment and control (PA) The purpose of the PA process is to determine the status of the project and ensure that the project performs according to plans and schedules, and within projected budgets, and that it satisfies technical objectives. This process includes the redirection of the project activities, as appropriate, in order to correct identified deviations and variations from other project management or technical processes. Redirection may include replanning as appropriate.

Decision management (DM) The purpose of the DM process is to select the most beneficial course of project action when alternatives exist. This process responds to a request for a decision encountered during the system life cycle, whatever its nature or source, in order to reach specified, desirable or optimized outcomes. Alternative actions are analyzed and a course of action is selected and directed. Decisions and their rationale are recorded to support future decision-making.

Risk management (RM) The purpose of the RM process is to identify, analyze, treat and monitor the risks continuously. The RM process is a continuous process by which to systematically address risk throughout the life cycle of a system or software product or service. It can be applied to risks related to the acquisition, development, maintenance or operation of a system.

Configuration management (CM) The purpose of the CM process is to establish and maintain the integrity of all identified outputs of a project or process and make them available to the parties concerned.

Information management (IM) The purpose of the IM process is to provide relevant, timely, complete, valid and, if required, confidential information to designated parties during and, as appropriate, after the system life cycle. This process generates, collects, transforms, retains, retrieves, disseminates and disposes of information. It manages designated information, including technical, project, organizational, agreement and user information.

Measurement (Me) The purpose of the Measurement process is to collect, analyze, and report data relating to the products developed and processes implemented within the organizational unit, to support the effective management of the processes, and to objectively demonstrate the quality of the products.

RQ7 This question aims to identify which of the 3C are supported by the listed tools. The classification used is inspired from a systematic review of awareness support in GSD carried out by Steinmacher et al. ( 2010 ) where the researchers presented an investigation of the role of the limitations of awareness support in the success of GSD projects based on the 3C model:

Communication When the tool brings improvements to the way in which messages and information are exchanged among people, reducing gaps, ambiguity and the effort needed to understand, establish, and continue a conversation.

Coordination When the tool focuses on providing people with support in order for them to manage themselves by checking and alerting them to the activities, resources and tasks performed by other people that may influence their work.

Cooperation When the tool aims to bring improvements to the shared space or the way in which users synchronously or asynchronously interact with shared artifacts.

Results and discussion

In this section, results for the selection procedure and quality assessment for selected articles in this SMS are presented. Then, results for the data extraction are exposed, analyzed and discussed for each RQ. Finally, implications and suggestions for researchers and practitioners are given. Figure  1 summarizes the mapping between this SMS’s operations and products.

Summary of the mapping processes

Selected studies

The search string that was applied to the different digital libraries and the search engines returned a high number of results (8993). Based on their title, keywords, abstract and perhaps the full text, the researchers tasked with the study selection process included those articles that might possibly answer the RQs presented in Table  1 . After completing the process explained in “ Study selection procedure ” section, 76 articles were selected. Thirteen articles were judged differently in the first phase but an agreement was reached for these articles on the second phase. The Cohen’s Kappa coefficient was used to calculate the interrater agreement between the two authors in their evaluation. The Kappa coefficient was 0.808 which according to Landis and Koch ( 1977 ), indicates a strong agreement between the two assessments. Figure  2 shows the results of the selection process, where “N” is the number of the remaining identified articles at each stage of the selection process.

Study selection results

Quality assessment

The rules shown in “ Quality assessment process ” section were used to conduct a quality assessment of the selected studies. The score obtained by each study is not systematically a sign of their quality, since studies with lower scores have a different research scope but are still useful as regards answering the RQs.

Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ) specifies that some researchers use quality assessment as selection criteria in their SLRs, but it is not mandatory. Following this rule, no studies have been discarded during the quality assessment process. The aim of this SMS is to gather an exhaustive list of the available SPM tools used in GSD, and such tools may be found even in those studies with lower score.

The main motivation of this quality assessment is to provide an overview of the usefulness of the selected papers in this SMS. Results show that 75% have an average score of 2.5 points or higher. Table  5 provides information about the total score of the selected articles. Detailed scores for each of the studies selected are available in Table 9 in Appendix  1 .

Table  6 shows the number of articles based on the ranking of the conference or journal in which they were published.

RQ1: Source and channel of publications

As shown in Table  7 , 38% of the selected papers, were presented at the International Conference on Global Software Engineering and its related workshops. This result clearly shows that the ICGSE conference is the main publication source for our topic. The ranking of the ICGSE is CORE C based on the latest CORE 2013 and it is the premier conference devoted to GSD. It has attracted the attention of several renown authors. For example, the works by Lanubile et al. ( 2013 ) and Prikladnicki et al. ( 2012 ) are derived from the analysis of the articles published in this conference. With regard to journals, IEEE Software is the journal with most publications focusing on SPM tools in GSD. It is ranked Q1 in JCR and four of the articles selected have been published in it.

The main publication target for articles related to the use of SPM tools in a GSD context would generally appear to be conferences, as 70% of the selected articles have been published via this channel. Table 9 in Appendix 1 provides more details on the selected articles per publication source and channel.

RQ2: Publication distribution per year

Figure 3 shows the number of primary studies per publication year. There has been a sizable increase in publications since 2006. This year corresponds to the first ICGSE conference and the increasing academic concern as regards studying the effect of globalization on the software industry; the same conclusion was reached by da Silva et al. ( 2010 ).

Number of publication per year

RQ3: Research type

Of the selected articles, 46% are solution proposals that have been derived solely from academic research. This prevalence hints that there may be a lack of existing tools with which to mitigate the effect of globalization on the software industry. In addition, 25% of the selected papers are evaluation research. Reviews represent 15% of the selected papers while another 14% represent the “Other” category, comprising opinion reports, experience papers and so on.

According to the data shown in Fig.  4 , the number of evaluation research papers is low in comparison to the number of solution proposals up until 2009. SPM in GSD is still a relatively new subject with different areas that have yet to be researched and explored. This has pushed researchers to produce several new tools that are intended for use in the GSD context (Lam and Maheshwari 2001 ; Sinha et al. 2007 ; Simmons and Ma 2006 ; Bowen and Maurer 2002 ). However, in order to carry out further research on this subject, empirical data was needed to assess the use and benefits of different tools used by project managers in GSD projects. This has led to a sizable increase of evaluation research and reviews in comparison to solution proposals.

Number of papers by research type per time period

These results can be explained using the Redwine & Riddle maturation model (Shaw 2002 ). This model stipulates that there is a trend indicating that technologies take 15–20 years to evolve from concept formulation to the point at which they are ready for popularization. The first 10 years of this evolution are spent investigating basic ideas and concepts, then developing a research community that converges on a compatible set of ideas and finally making a preliminary use of the technology and generalizing the approach.

RQ4: Research approach

The existing literature offers a relatively high number of solution proposal studies to support the management activity of GSD projects, and half of them have no empirical data to support their usefulness.

As shown in Fig.  5 , 57% (20 of 35) of the solution proposal studies included in our SMS are not validated empirically, while 31% (11 of 35) are validated through experiments. It has been noted that most of these tools are academic, showing a lack of collaboration between industry and researchers in this field. There have simultaneously been very few evaluations of the existing tools used in industry. Only eight evaluation papers are based on industrial case studies.

Research types and approaches

In our opinion, this situation may have been caused by two factors:

SPM experiments in GSD are difficult to conduct. GSD settings imply that the subjects of the experiment must be from different geographic locations, different time zones and different cultures. This can complicate the empirical evaluation of tools in industrial environments (Šmite et al. 2010 ).

Although some examples can be found in literature (Habra et al. 2008 ; Cuadrado et al. 2014 ), software companies are unlikely to collaborate with researchers in project management because they keep their research and tools confidential.

RQ5: SPM tools used in GSD

After synthesizing the data obtained from the selected studies, a list of 102 tools was compiled. Figure  6 displays the number of the tools retrieved from literature based on their type of license and whether they focus on one or several SPM processes. Results show that 48% of these tools are the fruit of academic research which seems logical considering that most of the literature reviewed is research related, 24.5% of the tools are free and open source software (FOSS) while the remaining 28.5% are commercial tools.

Tools by license and number of areas covered

As shown in Fig.  6 , tools focusing on a specific process (mono-activity tool) are dominant in comparison with tools focusing on several processes (multi-activity tool). For example, tools like Travis (Geisser et al. 2007 ), DPMTool (Garrido et al. 2012 ) and Microsoft Office Communicator (Niinimaki et al. 2010 ) focus on a particular process while other tools focus on several activities (see Table 12 in Appendix 2 ). Another example of a single activity tool is Atlassian JIRA (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ; Lanubile et al. 2010 ) which is considered to be an issue tracker without any other relevant features, thus focusing only on the PA process. IBM Rational Team Concert (Scharff et al. 2010 ; Treude and Storey 2012 ; Wang et al. 2012 ), meanwhile, has PP, artifact management and messaging features. In this case, it is focused on PP, CM and IM processes.

We noted that 24% of research, 17% of commercial and 8% of free tools focus on more than one SPM process. Researchers tend to create tools that cover most of the development lifecycle process. Tools like: Enabler Framework (Sinha et al. 2007 ), GWSE (Gorton et al. 1997a ), Milos ASE (Bowen and Maurer 2002 ), NextMove (Mak and Kruchten 2006 ), PAMPA2 (Simmons 2003 ), PSW (Eskeli et al. 2011 ) and SEES (Simmons and Ma 2006 ) fall into this category (see Table 12 in Appendix 2 ).

The majority of the tools listed in this study (79 out of 102) are SATs that are intended to satisfy a specific design. However, the use of SATs increases context switches, which can be a source of frustration (Sengupta et al. 2006 ). The second largest category is environment, of which there are 9. The third largest category is platforms with eight tools. Note that platforms are dominated by commercial solutions (6 out of 8). This can be explained by the effort required to develop platforms in terms of time and human resources that can barely be afforded by researchers (Sengupta et al. 2006 ). Figure  7 shows the percentage for each category. The extensive list of the tools available that have been obtained from the literature review is provided in Table 12 in Appendix 2 .

Percentage of tools by type

During the data extraction process, two entities were found to be behind several of the studies selected in this SMS. First, the Alarcos Research Group at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain authored 11 studies regarding tools used in SPM for GSD projects (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 , 2012 , 2014 ; Jiménez et al. 2009 ; Garrido et al. 2012 ; Lanubile et al. 2010 ; Aranda et al. 2006 , 2011 ; Monasor et al. 2010a , b ; Aranda et al. 2008 ; Palacio et al. 2011 ). Second, the IBM research lab, which involves researchers from India, Japan and the USA, published three papers (Sinha et al. 2006 , 2007 ; Miyamoto et al. 2012 ). IBM is one of the largest developers of solutions for SPM in GSD projects with tools like IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational Team Concert.

Considering that globalization affects countries all over the world, presenting a ratio of the selected studies per country may be enlightening in the context of this study. This ratio was obtained by using the following method: each selected study was awarded one point. This point was then divided equally between the researchers involved in the study. Finally, each country accumulated points for researchers based on the location of their affiliated entities. As an example, study (Thissen et al. 2007 ) was carried out by two researchers from the USA, one from Australia and another from India. The USA therefore obtains 0.5 of a point, Australia 0.25 and India 0.25. These results are presented in Table  8 .

In this perspective it will be noted that the USA has the highest percentage followed closely by Finland and that European countries are heavily involved in research on this particular topic. Nonetheless, typically outsourced emerging countries like Brazil and India (Javalgi et al. 2009 ) are also contributing to this research line.

RQ6: SPM areas covered by tools

Figure  8 presents the number of tools per SPM process. It shows a disparity in the number of tools identified between the SPM processes.

Number of tools covering each SPM area

The IM process suffers the most from the effect of high distribution (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ), which is considered to be one of the top challenges regarding SPM in a global context (da Silva et al. 2010 ). This area is covered by 52 of the 102 identified tools—a little bit more than half of them. However, it is important to note that in our classification, and in contrast to other surveys (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 ; Giuffrida and Dittrich 2013 ), we consider that social software and knowledge management tools fall under the scope of the IM process. These tools generally focus on the communication aspect of the 3C Model, since they have integrated features of instant messaging, forums or wikis.

The CM process is covered by 32 tools. They are version control tools which are more focused on collaboration and concerned with the integrity of the project’s outputs (software or documents). Their prominent feature is automatic messaging, which is triggered by new version updates to alert the parties concerned.

PA and PP processes are covered by 26 and 17 tools respectively that enhance collaboration in distributed teams. Eight of these tools propose features that cover both PA and PP processes, namely: ActiveCollab (Lanubile et al. 2010 ), BaseCamp (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ), Enabler Framework (Sinha et al. 2007 ), GWSE (Gorton et al. 1997a ), Issue Player (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ), MILOS ASE (Bowen and Maurer 2002 ), PSW (Eskeli et al. 2011 ), Workspace Activity Viewer  (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ). However, six of the issue trackers considered in this study fall under the heading of assessment and control processes and are not concerned with planning, thus focusing solely on issue management, such as Atlassian JIRA (Lanubile et al. 2010 ) and Bugzilla (Lanubile et al. 2010 ).

DM, RM and measurement processes have very few tools to support their activities when compared to other SPM areas. Only three tools support RM, three tools support measurement and two tools support DM. Researchers should focus more on these areas as they are inadequately supported by proper tools. RM should particularly attract tool builders’ attention. Controlling the risks in software projects in general (Bannerman 2008 ), and global software projects in particular (Persson et al. 2009 ), greatly contributes to project success.

According to the Capability Maturity Model Integration version 1.3 (CMMI v1.3) (CMMI Product Team 2010 ), Me is considered to be a core process of the 2nd maturity level denominated as “Managed” while DM and RM are considered to be core processes of the 3rd maturity level, which is termed as “Defined”. The fact that these areas are not adequately supported by tools might indicate that SPM processes for GSD projects are not yet mature (Šmite et al. 2010 ). These projects often include ad hoc reactive processes that are unable to anticipate problems.

RQ7: 3C collaboration model comparison

The tools that have been identified have specific features that manage the challenges that high distribution poses as regards the success of GSD projects. Three key areas have been tackled by GSD tools to support group interaction, namely the 3Cs:

Communication The tools studied integrate a number of features that are intended to reduce the effect of geographical distance and time zone differences on group awareness. These features include instant messaging, forums, e-mail notifications, audio/videoconferencing, and wikis. A total of 49 tools support communication using these features. Lack of communication is considered to be one of the key challenges when managing traditional or agile software development projects in a globally distributed environment (Dullemond et al. 2009 ). Informal communication in particular is frequently used in agile software development (stand-up meetings, face to face communication, etc.), but is, however, poorly represented. In this regard, Dullemond et al. ( 2010 ), Dullemond and van Gameren ( 2012 ) have developed a tool named “Communico” that creates a virtual open space in which users can overhear others’ conversations.

Coordination Coordination between project actors is ensured through an improved awareness of team members’ activities. A total of 40 tools support coordination by using e-mail notifications or a dynamic visualization interface of team project members and their respective activities. Tools like ActiveCollab (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 ), WorldView (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ) and Workspace Activity Viewer (Lanubile et al. 2010 ) provide an overview of ongoing project activities and give managers an overview of project status at different levels of detail. This information can be used by project managers or developers to enhance coordination and task allocation in a globally distributed software development team.

Cooperation According to Gorton et al. ( 1997a ), the vast majority of the tools used in a collocated development context are designed to support only single-user activity, thus making the exchange of information between users more difficult. This problem is particularly frequent in the CM process in which the project metadata must be shared in a controlled manner. In this SMS, 69 cooperative tools have been identified, which makes cooperation the most prominent feature in SPM tools for GSD. The tools in this category are mainly artifact management or versioning system tools that provide a shared and distributed workspace by using either a centralized or a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture.

Figure  9 shows how many tools focus on communication, coordination, cooperation or a combination of them. For example, 49 tools have features that focus on communication, and 14 of those also focus on coordination. On the other hand 23 tools focus on communication and cooperation. Finally, eleven tools consider all sides of the 3C model, i.e., communication, coordination and cooperation. See Table 12 in Appendix 2 for more information on this subject.

Number of tools according to the 3C collaboration model dimensions

Implications for research and practice

The results of this research contribute to GSD in many ways. Firstly, they provide the academic community with a better understanding of the SPM activities and tools used in GSD settings and show gaps in the areas in which tooling is insufficient or inadequate. This information can open up opportunities for future advances by both researchers, who will better understand the landscape of GSD and tackle its challenges, and tool builders, who may wish to provide new tools that are capable of mitigating the effect of globalization on the management of software projects. Secondly, project managers involved in highly distributed projects will have an overview of the existing tools intended to support their activities and identify those which are most likely to meet their needs. The recommendations to researchers and practitioners resulting from the conclusions drawn from this SMS are as follows:

Practitioners such as tool builders and project managers, along with researchers involved in GSD project management, are eager to know about latest research on the subject. They should view articles published in the proceedings of the ICGSE conference and its affiliated workshops. The latter is the main publication source for studies about SPM in GSD. In the same line, researchers are encouraged to send their articles to this conference.

The results of this SMS indicate a lack of empirical validation of the various solutions proposed. Only 24.7% of the tools identified in our study have been empirically validated. A similar percentage was obtained in a previous mapping study of GSD tools (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ). Researchers are encouraged to assess their tools using experiments in order to provide qualitative and quantitative data about tool usage. In this case, we encourage geographically separated research groups with socio-cultural differences to collaborate, thus making it easier to simulate GSD experiments whilst simultaneously benefiting from the advantages of global distribution (Prause et al. 2010 ). We also encourage practitioners to collaborate closely with research groups in order to validate existing tools through case studies or surveys, thus providing useful data which tool builders can use to create tools that are capable of satisfying the demands of GSD project management.

A number of tools that are, according to literature, intended to support SPM activities in the GSD context have been listed in this study. Practitioners, and particularly project managers, can use this list to select tools that can support their activities. License type and technology type are specified for each tool in order to ease this choice (see Table 12 in Appendix  2 ).

Decision management, risk management and measurement processes are not adequately supported by tools when compared to the other SPM processes. Researchers are encouraged to engage in lines of research that may enable the reasons for this disparity to be discovered. Practitioners are encouraged to fill the tooling gaps in these processes.

Threats to validity

The validity of the study is concerned with the trustworthiness of its results. The conclusions of this research may have been threatened by bias resulting from the researchers’ subjective point of view. The categorization used in Runeson et al. ( 2012 ), Wohlin et al. ( 2012 ) is adopted to identify the limitations of this SMS. These limitations are classified as follows:

Construct validity

Construction validity refers to the extent to which the operational measures that are studied really represent what the RQs aim to answer. In an SMS, two factors can be easily identified as a threat to construct validity. One is the research string used, while the other is the digital libraries researched. In this study, we have performed a systematic search using an extensive range of terms to widen our scope of research. The search keywords were proposed by two authors in several iterations to ensure that all relevant literature would be included in the study. Another threat to the construct validity is the choice of digital libraries used. This risk was mitigated by the identification of three digital libraries as the main source of related articles according to existing literature. Two digital search engines were also used to provide additional sources for related articles. A manual search of the reference lists in the selected studies in order to complement the SMS is strongly suggested by Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ). This process has not been conducted and is considered to be one of the limitations of the construct validity.

Internal validity

With regard to the internal validity of the study, the classification and the decision to assign a specific tool to a specific area of project management can be judged to be subjective. Similar studies (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ; Tell and Ali Babar 2012 ) have, for example, classified tools in a different manner and in different fields. In order to decrease this effect, the classification scheme was proposed and the categorization process was carried out by two authors while the others reviewed the final results. Moreover, the steps and activities in this scheme were clearly described to allow the conclusions drawn from the results of this SMS to be reproduced. We have attempted to decrease this threat, by displaying the data retrieved from each of the articles selected in Tables 9, 10 and 12 of Appendices 1 and 2 in order to enable interested readers to check their validity.

Conclusion validity

Conclusion validity is the degree to which the conclusions we reach about relationships in our data are reasonable and is concerned with the ability to replicate these findings. In an SMS, the threat to conclusion validity is a factor that may lead to an incorrect conclusion being reached about a relationship in the observed data. Bias as regards both selecting and classifying primary studies and tools along with analyzing data may therefore affect the interpretation of the results. In order to mitigate this threat, each step of the selection, extraction and analysis of the data was validated by means of the systematic process and the periodic reviews carried out by the researchers involved in this work. Finally, this SMS has inherited the threats to validity of its primary studies.

External validity

External validity concerns how far the results of a study can be generalized. In this case, it concerns the external validity of the tools presented. The ratio of academic tools to commercial tools, along with the fact that the selected studies included in this SMS that discuss industrial tools are written by authors who are involved in both research and industrial fields, lead us to believe that our tool list is not exhaustive and that some of the tools used in industry may not have been included. Furthermore, some details about the tools were difficult to obtain, since our tool list was indirectly built, starting from the primary studies and not from the tool’s experience. Nevertheless, the results of this study may serve as a starting point for SPM for GSD researchers and practitioners.

Conclusions and future work

This paper reports an SMS that explores how tools support SPM activities in GSD. Seventy-six studies were selected and a total of 102 tools were identified in literature and were classified according to the following criteria: license, type, SPM area they support and dimension of 3C collaboration model they focus on. During the process of this SMS, we noticed that although a large number of standalone tools are proposed, fewer tools cover the whole SPM process. A commercial platform and an environment created by international companies have been encountered during research prior to this SMS: IBM Rational and Microsoft Visual Studio. These tools have integrated a number of commercial standalone tools that collaborate and exchange information in a seamless manner, thus ensuring that the project manager’s activities are consistently supported throughout the development lifecycle.

Two studies (Sinha et al. 2007 ; Eskeli et al. 2011 ) present and advocate the use of frameworks that allow the integration of a heterogeneous number of tools in order to collaborate and exchange data while maintaining their independence. This can help project managers who cannot afford to buy expensive integrated platforms to construct their own platform using the standalone tools at their disposal. Teams collaborating on the same task and using different tools can also continue to do so, thus capitalizing on their knowledge of the tools that they are already familiar with. The first tool is called Enabler Framework and proposed by Sinha et al. ( 2007 ). Although this tool was never released, it is to the best of our knowledge the first integrating framework to be proposed in literature. The other is PSW, which was proposed by Eskeli et al. ( 2011 ) as part of the ITEA PRISMA project. The latter has been tested by the project partners, and according to their website, they have achieved major benefits without making any major changes to their tool’s infrastructure ( 2011 ).

The limitations discussed in “ Threats to validity ” section show clear paths for future work on the subject. The ability to consult other digital libraries will greatly enhance the accuracy of the results. Including more tools in the study via search methods other than systematic queries in digital libraries may also be more rewarding. A more fruitful process would, for example, be to use manual research via the Internet or to carry out surveys with collaborators from industry (de Gea et al. 2011 , 2012 ). Limited by the number and availability of the 102 identified tools, only an empirical validation of a set of tools can be conducted. A set of tools providing the most support to group interaction and covering the whole SPM process could be selected and evaluated in order to assess their usefulness for practitioners. Further investigation into the lack of tools in DM, RM and Me will be conducted to identify challenges related to GSD and a tool will be developed to counter them.

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Authors' contributions

The protocol was proposed by the SYC and reviewed independently by the remaining authors. SYC and AI carried out independently the selection process based on the mapping process and merged their results to get the final list of selected articles. SYC collected the data from the selected articles and classified the tools according to available information. AI, JNR, JLF-A, JMCG and AT reviewed each a section of the final list of tools. SYC drafted the manuscript. AI, JNR, JLF-A, JMCG and AT revised the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Erasmus Mundus program Action 2: EU Mare Nostrum UE-MARE NOSTRUM (Grant 204195-EM-1-2011-1-ES-ERA MUNDUS-EMA21), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European FEDER funds through the GEODAS-REQ Project (TIN2012-37493-C03-02).

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Software Project Management Research Team, ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

Saad Yasser Chadli & Ali Idri

Department of Informatics and Systems, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

Joaquín Nicolás Ros, José Luis Fernández-Alemán, Juan M. Carrillo de Gea & Ambrosio Toval

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Correspondence to Saad Yasser Chadli or Ali Idri .

Appendix 1 provides detailed information concerning the selected articles. The information provided is the publication source and channel in Table  10 . The year of publication, research type and approach, along with a detailed quality score for each selected article are provided in Table  9 .

Appendix 2 provides detailed information on the tools that have been listed by means of this SMS, which SPM area they support, their license, their type and which of the dimensions of the 3C collaboration model they focus on. This information is displayed in Table 12 and the acronyms used are explained in Table 11 .

Command search queries used for IEEE Xplore

“Document Title”:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

“Abstract”:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

“Author Keywords”:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

Command search queries used for ScienceDirect

tak ((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

Command search queries used for ACM

(Title:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology))

(Abstract:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology))

(Keywords:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology))

Command search queries used for GoogleScholar

allintitle:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

Command search queries used for DBLP

Research was carried out by typing all possible combinations of the specified search query as DBLP search interface does not offer the possibility to use command search query.

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Chadli, S.Y., Idri, A., Ros, J.N. et al. Software project management tools in global software development: a systematic mapping study. SpringerPlus 5 , 2006 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-016-3670-7

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Software project management tools in global software development: a systematic mapping study

Saad yasser chadli.

1 Software Project Management Research Team, ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

Joaquín Nicolás Ros

2 Department of Informatics and Systems, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

José Luis Fernández-Alemán

Juan m. carrillo de gea, ambrosio toval.

Global software development (GSD) which is a growing trend in the software industry is characterized by a highly distributed environment. Performing software project management (SPM) in such conditions implies the need to overcome new limitations resulting from cultural, temporal and geographic separation. The aim of this research is to discover and classify the various tools mentioned in literature that provide GSD project managers with support and to identify in what way they support group interaction. A systematic mapping study has been performed by means of automatic searches in five sources. We have then synthesized the data extracted and presented the results of this study. A total of 102 tools were identified as being used in SPM activities in GSD. We have classified these tools, according to the software life cycle process on which they focus and how they support the 3C collaboration model (communication, coordination and cooperation). The majority of the tools found are standalone tools (77%). A small number of platforms (8%) also offer a set of interacting tools that cover the software development lifecycle. Results also indicate that SPM areas in GSD are not adequately supported by corresponding tools and deserve more attention from tool builders.

Globalization as an economic and social trend has relentlessly pushed businesses to turn from national markets toward a global market in which new forms of concurrence and cooperation have been spawned. In the last decade, software development in particular has undergone a drastic change in its business operations and processes. This concerns not only marketing and distribution but also the way in which software is conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers (Herbsleb and Moitra 2001 ). In particular, global software development (GSD) is now an expanding trend in the software industry (Santos et al. 2012 ) owing to the advantages that it may have over collocated software development (Conchúir et al. 2006 , 2009 ). It helps software companies access highly qualified resources at a lower cost, provides them with easier access to customers and allows 24/7 work shifts. However, it also adds new challenges to the management of the already complex software projects (da Silva et al. 2010 ). The geographic separation of teams, the social and cultural differences among people, along with time zone differences, greatly impact on communication and collaboration and limit the success of projects in a highly distributed environment (Steinmacher et al. 2013 ; Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ).

Research on GSD has increased since it is becoming an effective technique (Haq et al. 2011 ) and existing descriptions of the software project management (SPM) field (PMI 2004 ; Abran et al. 2001 ) do not consider globalization explicitly. This has therefore led to a new need to study and assess the downsides of GSD in SPM and to provide new methods, techniques and tools with which to alleviate them. As a result, industry has adopted both existing and new tools to deal with GSD. These tools have features that make them suitable as regards reducing temporal, geographic and socio-cultural distance (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 ).

Lanubile et al. ( 2013 ) published a survey on the key technologies and tools that support group awareness and collaboration in GSD projects. The systematic literature review (SLR) by da Silva et al. ( 2010 ) collected 30 challenges regarding SPM in distributed software development from 54 studies published between 1998 and 2009. Jiménez et al. ( 2009 ) identified ten challenges and proposed a continuous improvement model to counter these challenges. In these two studies, a lack of group awareness, communication, coordination and collaboration are considered to be key factors in the complexity of SPM activities in a highly distributed context. Research is still ongoing to discover factors weighing in the failure of GSD projects. Two studies conducted in 2016 (Niazi et al. 2016a , b ) aim to identify challenges that might undermine the success of such projects. These studies were carried out by the means of an SLR and were validated using data retrieved from questionnaire based survey. Their results indicate that GSD projects still suffer from a lack of communication and coordination between stakeholders.

In this paper we report a systematic mapping study (SMS) on the tools used for SPM in the context of GSD. Its purpose is to identify these tools, to classify them using an international standard [ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 “Systems & Software Engineering—Software Lifecycle Process” ( 2008 )] and to show how they support practitioners’ activities. The information provided by this study includes a list of tools and their attributes, such as: License type, technology type (framework, stand alone tool, plug-in … ) and whether they foster communication, coordination and cooperation between different stakeholders. This may prove useful for software project managers who have to deal with a distributed environment, helping them choose between the variety of tools that are intended to support their activities. Both tool builders and researchers can also identify prominent publication sources for relevant studies and areas of SPM in which the least number of tools is available, thus paving the way for the development of new tools.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: “ Related work ” section identifies related work concerning the topic of the SMS. “ Mapping process ” section presents the systematic mapping, including its planning, conduction and analysis. In “ Results and discussion ” section, the results and findings of the study are shown and discussed and the implications for researchers and practitioners are then described. “ Threats to validity ” section states the limitations of the review. Finally, “ Conclusions and future work ” section presents the conclusions of this SMS and possible future work.

Related work

Early research on the subject was conducted by da Silva et al. ( 2010 ) in an SLR carried out in 2010, in which researchers were able to list 24 tools intended for SPM use in a highly distributed environment. The goal of this study was to identify the challenges confronted by project managers in this context, best practices that overcome these difficulties and both the tools and models that support these practices. An evidence-based project management improvement model was ultimately presented. This model aims to provide practitioners and researchers with support as regards attaining a better understanding of the landscape of GSD project challenges and devise more effective solutions to improve project management in a distributed setting. In the same year, Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2010 ) published a survey of 35 tools classified with the use of the processes presented in the ISO/IEC 12207 standard ( 2008 ). A matching between these tools, their features and the distance factor they reduce was presented.

In an SMS published in 2012, Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2012 ) collected 132 tools intended for use in the GSD realm and classified them by considering the areas defined in the SWEBOK (Abran et al. 2001 ). According to their study, 21 tools are used to engineer project management, while the others are more oriented toward the technical process of software development. The same authors also presented a list of empirically validated tools, one of their findings regarding this question being that only 25.8% of the tools listed in their study have been evaluated in a distributed environment.

Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) tackle the same subject as (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ) more extensively and classify the tools using various categorizations. In their mapping study, they were able to identify and classify 412 tools intended for the GSD domain extracted from a set of 182 primary studies. The researchers used three classifications schemes, the first being the technology type of the tools, the second being which of the 3C (communication, coordination, cooperation) collaboration model dimensions are supported and the last being which of the software development activities, the tool intends to support. The 3C collaboration model has been proposed by Ellis et al. ( 1991 ) and adopted by Fuks et al. ( 2008 ). It advocates the analysis, representation, and development of groupware by means of the interplay between the 3Cs, namely, Communication, Coordination, and Cooperation. The model became widely accepted for analyzing tools employed to support computer-mediated interactions (Tell and Ali Babar 2012 ) and has also been used as a classification scheme in this SMS.

Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2010 ) and Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) both published a set of tools intended for GSD use as part of an SMS study. These two studies were conducted at nearly the same time while researchers were unaware of the other study for most of their research and can give a useful insight on how the method used can alter the results. The study from Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) offers a list of 412 tools while the study from Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2010 ) offers a list of only 132. Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) aware at the end of the other study discuss these differences and claim it to be essentially due to the search terms used and digital libraries queried. Another difference is that some tools have been classified differently in these studies. These tiny differences occurred not only because they used different classification methods but also because they attributed each tool to a unique class while some tools tend to have more than just one use and can be attributed as such to different classes. Associating each tool to a unique class can hinder the preciseness of the results produced and has been avoided in this SMS.

To the best of our knowledge, no systematic mapping or review of the tools available in GSD has been performed to date with a focus on SPM activities and processes. As stated above, da Silva et al. ( 2010 ) proposed a model for SPM in a GSD context, but they did not focus on the tools used nor classify them according to a widely known standard. Furthermore, although Portillo-Rodríguez et al. ( 2012 ) and Tell and Ali Babar ( 2012 ) present exhaustive lists of the GSD tools that are available, in these studies, project management solely comprises project planning, while other areas such as knowledge management and configuration are not considered as part of engineering project management. In this study, we aim to aggregate and update lists of tools used in GSD, provided by selected secondary studies, while focusing on SPM processes.

Mapping process

SMSs are designed to provide a classified scheme of a broad research area, and to categorize existing research evidence on a topic and its subsequent results. These results can identify gaps in research, and an SLR can then be used to study these gaps in greater depth. In this section, the research questions (RQs) of this study are first laid down and the search string used to query the digital libraries is constructed based on the PICO method. Afterwards, digital libraries used are specified, Inclusion and Exclusion criteria are defined and a quality assessment method is established. Finally the data extraction method is indicated for each RQ. The protocol of this SMS is based on the recommendations of Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ), and the method used is presented in the following subsections.

Research questions

The RQs aim to classify the tools available in terms of features and type and to assess their use in the software industry. The RQs and their motivations are displayed in Table  1 .

RQs and main motivations

For the purpose of this study, SPM is defined as the project processes of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 “Systems and Software Engineering—Software Lifecycle Process” ( 2008 ). Project processes include project management processes that are used to establish and evolve project plans, to assess actual achievement and progress against the plans and to control execution of the project through to fulfillment, along with project support processes that support specialized management ( 2008 ). Individual processes are defined in “ Data extraction and synthesis ” section—RQ6.

Search strategy

In order to answer the RQs, a search was conducted using a search string composed of keywords relevant to this study and applied to a number of academic electronic libraries and search engines.

Search string

Following the guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ) using the PICO method (population, intervention, comparison, outcome), the keywords initially identified from the RQs are:

• Population: Global software development .
• Intervention: Software project management .
• Outcome: Tool .

Comparison is not relevant in this study, since it is an exploratory study. The Intervention keyword has proven to be limiting the group of studies targeted by this SMS. The reason being that most papers do not talk specifically about SPM but rather SPM processes (e.g. planning, version control), consequently, the intervention keyword has been dropped.

The search terms that have similar meanings are organized into groups. Combined terms are obtained using the OR logical operator between search terms in the same group. The final search string is obtained using the AND logical operator between combined terms of different groups. The search string used is: [(global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE] AND (tool OR technology).

The search terms used have been inspired from similar research (da Silva et al. 2010 ; Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ) and the authors suggestions.

Literature resources

Automatic searches using the specified search string has been performed in the following digital databases in January 2015:

• IEEE Xplore ( 2016 ).
• ScienceDirect ( 2016 ).
• Association for computing machinery (ACM) ( 2016 ).
• Google Scholar ( 2016 ).
• Digital bibliography and library project (DBLP) ( 2016 ).

The digital libraries used in this SMS have been selected by using previous SLRs and SMSs in the same field and with a similar scope as a basis. In studies (da Silva et al. 2010 ; Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ; Jiménez et al. 2009 ; Costa et al. 2010 ), researchers have unfailingly used IEEE Xplore, ACM and ScienceDirect libraries and the studies selected from these digital libraries represent 79, 92, 83 and 80% respectively of the total number of studies selected in each review. Two additional search engines (Google Scholar and DBLP) were also used in order to include more results.

The impossibility of performing the search in all the digital databases and search engines using the same method signified that a specific configuration of the search string was used with each search engine. Command search queries used in each digital library and search engine is available in Appendix 3 .

Study selection procedure

Candidate studies from the automated searches were reviewed by two authors separately, who were asked to determine the relevancy of papers based on their title and abstract. A paper was accepted if both researchers agreed that the study was relevant; it was refused if both researchers agreed that the paper was irrelevant. Those papers upon which the researchers could not reach an agreement were reviewed in a second phase, during which the researchers resolved their disagreements in a meeting in which they exchanged their ideas on the content of the papers and their relevancy after studying the full text of the article.

In the case of a journal article extending a conference paper, both papers are selected as long as they pass the selection procedure. During the study selection procedure, relevant studies were identified using the inclusion and exclusion criteria cited here after:

Inclusion criteria

• The paper studied one or several tools that support SPM activities in a GSD context.

Exclusion criteria

• The paper studied SPM techniques (without tools) used in GSD.
• The paper was a workshop summary.
• Paper was not in English.

The exclusion criteria were applied using “OR” logical operator between them.

Tool identification and classification procedure

Although some tools can be thought not to be related to this research, further investigation of their use in industry and their features proved otherwise. A tool like “Eclipse help system” is primarily a help system for an IDE and would commonly be considered to be outside of this research’s scope. Nonetheless, it allows users to create and modify project documentation, which can then be used by other stakeholders. This feature allows knowledge to be created and shared. This tool can then be included in the group of tools that support the IM process. “Social software” can also be a source of confusion as they are frequently used inside and outside work context, but recent studies indicate that tools such as Skype, Twitter, etc., have been widely used in the GSD industry to provide additional communication channels (Niazi et al. 2015 ; Giuffrida and Dittrich 2013 ).

Information necessary to classify the tools was retrieved primarily from the selected studies. In case information is incomplete or missing, it was retrieved from the tool builder website or generic information on the Internet. The first author was tasked with classifying the tools using available information, the remaining authors were tasked with reviewing each a section of the final list of tools in order to cover the whole list. In case of a disagreement, the authors held a meeting where they exchanged their ideas based on viable information until an agreement was reached.

Quality assessment process

Each of the primary studies selected was assessed to ascertain its quality using four criteria inspired by previous studies (Ouhbi et al. 2015 ; Fernandez et al. 2011 ):

Some papers may present a discussion about our research subject but only in a secondary manner, while the main topic of the paper is different. We consider that these papers are not as interesting for our SMS as those which are entirely dedicated to discussing SPM tools in a GSD context.

Some papers may only present guidelines or recommendations as to how to use or develop tools. These papers might be interesting for our discussion but our main research goal is to list all available tools. The paper achieves the full score if a new tool is presented or an existing tool is assessed.

• QA3 The study uses empirical results for argumentation (yes +1/no +0). The results and conclusions of the study are strengthened by empirical evidence and it provides important and reliable information about future research and practice (Šmite et al. 2010 ).
• Conf: (CORE A* +2/CORE A +1.5/CORE B +1/CORE C +0.5).
• Journal: (Q1 +2/Q2 +1.5/Q3 +1/Q4 +0.5).
• No ranking: +0.

JCR uses the impact factor to rank journals by their field of interest. Those ranked in the first quartile are called Q1 journals. Those in the second, third and last are respectively called Q2, Q3, Q4 journals. CORE2013 uses the following ranking categories, derived primarily from earlier CORE ranking exercises: CORE A* (flagship conference), CORE A (excellent conference), CORE B (good conference), CORE C (other ranked conference).

Although there is a general opinion that journal papers are better than conference papers, Bowyer ( 2012 ) is the opinion that conferences and journals are different by nature and cannot be compared; we also agree with this statement, since both contribute to the dissemination of knowledge in their own way. The quality classification scheme of the selected studies is based on a global unsupervised discretization method (Dougherty et al. 1995 ), a variation of the equal width interval binning in which the upper and lower bins are shorter than others with the intention of discriminating between extreme scores. The classification scheme is presented in Table  2 .

Quality classification scheme

Data extraction and synthesis

The data needed to answer the RQs in Table  1 were extracted by exploring the full text of each selected article. A spreadsheet was used to store the data concerning each article whose structure is presented in Table  3 . Another spreadsheet was used to extract data concerning tools, which is presented in Table  4 . The strategy is hereafter explained for each RQ:

• RQ1 The publication source and channel for each paper is listed and the aggregated results will be presented.
• RQ2 The publication year for each paper is listed, and the aggregated result will provide an overview of the number of related articles per year.
• Evaluation research Existing SPM tools are implemented in a GSD context and an evaluation or a validation of these tools is conducted.
• Solution proposal An SPM tool designed for GSD is proposed. This solution may be a new tool or a significant extension of an existing tool. The potential benefits and the applicability of the solution could be shown with an empirical study or a good argumentation.
• Review An analysis of existing literature concerning SPM tools in a GSD context.
• Other Any other research type not listed above (e.g. experience report, opinion paper, etc.).
• Case study An empirical inquiry that investigates a tool within its real-life context.
• Survey A method for collecting quantitative information concerning a tool (e.g. a questionnaire).
• Experiment An empirical method applied under controlled conditions.
• Non empirical Non empirical research approaches or a theoretical evaluation of a tool.
• Other Any approach not listed above.
• Standalone tool (SAT) an independent software application fulfilling a specific design intent.
• Framework a “semi-complete” application that provides an integrated set of domain-specific structures and functionality.
• Environment a development environment that comprises a set of processes and programming tools used to create software products. Moreover, an integrated development environment is a subset of this group, which identifies a development environment that has a unified interface.
• Platform a set of generic components that form a common structure, from which a set of derivative products can be developed.
• Plug-in a software component that interacts with an existing software application through the use of well defined application programming interfaces (APIs), often designed to enhance it by adding new functionalities.
• Commercial Tools whose license can be obtained by means of payment, although a free trial period may be offered.
• Free Tools whose license can be obtained without payment. In this license type we include licenses such as Apache License, general public license (GPL), etc.
• Research Tools or prototypes developed by research groups which are not freely or commercially available.
• Project planning (PP) The purpose of the PP process is to produce and communicate effective and workable project plans. This process determines the scope of the project management and technical activities, identifies process outputs, project tasks and deliverables, establishes schedules during which the project task will be conducted, including achievement criteria, and states which resources are required to accomplish project tasks.
• Project assessment and control (PA) The purpose of the PA process is to determine the status of the project and ensure that the project performs according to plans and schedules, and within projected budgets, and that it satisfies technical objectives. This process includes the redirection of the project activities, as appropriate, in order to correct identified deviations and variations from other project management or technical processes. Redirection may include replanning as appropriate.
• Decision management (DM) The purpose of the DM process is to select the most beneficial course of project action when alternatives exist. This process responds to a request for a decision encountered during the system life cycle, whatever its nature or source, in order to reach specified, desirable or optimized outcomes. Alternative actions are analyzed and a course of action is selected and directed. Decisions and their rationale are recorded to support future decision-making.
• Risk management (RM) The purpose of the RM process is to identify, analyze, treat and monitor the risks continuously. The RM process is a continuous process by which to systematically address risk throughout the life cycle of a system or software product or service. It can be applied to risks related to the acquisition, development, maintenance or operation of a system.
• Configuration management (CM) The purpose of the CM process is to establish and maintain the integrity of all identified outputs of a project or process and make them available to the parties concerned.
• Information management (IM) The purpose of the IM process is to provide relevant, timely, complete, valid and, if required, confidential information to designated parties during and, as appropriate, after the system life cycle. This process generates, collects, transforms, retains, retrieves, disseminates and disposes of information. It manages designated information, including technical, project, organizational, agreement and user information.
• Measurement (Me) The purpose of the Measurement process is to collect, analyze, and report data relating to the products developed and processes implemented within the organizational unit, to support the effective management of the processes, and to objectively demonstrate the quality of the products.
• Communication When the tool brings improvements to the way in which messages and information are exchanged among people, reducing gaps, ambiguity and the effort needed to understand, establish, and continue a conversation.
• Coordination When the tool focuses on providing people with support in order for them to manage themselves by checking and alerting them to the activities, resources and tasks performed by other people that may influence their work.
• Cooperation When the tool aims to bring improvements to the shared space or the way in which users synchronously or asynchronously interact with shared artifacts.

Article data extraction form

Tool data extraction form

Results and discussion

In this section, results for the selection procedure and quality assessment for selected articles in this SMS are presented. Then, results for the data extraction are exposed, analyzed and discussed for each RQ. Finally, implications and suggestions for researchers and practitioners are given. Figure  1 summarizes the mapping between this SMS’s operations and products.

Summary of the mapping processes

Selected studies

The search string that was applied to the different digital libraries and the search engines returned a high number of results (8993). Based on their title, keywords, abstract and perhaps the full text, the researchers tasked with the study selection process included those articles that might possibly answer the RQs presented in Table  1 . After completing the process explained in “ Study selection procedure ” section, 76 articles were selected. Thirteen articles were judged differently in the first phase but an agreement was reached for these articles on the second phase. The Cohen’s Kappa coefficient was used to calculate the interrater agreement between the two authors in their evaluation. The Kappa coefficient was 0.808 which according to Landis and Koch ( 1977 ), indicates a strong agreement between the two assessments. Figure  2 shows the results of the selection process, where “N” is the number of the remaining identified articles at each stage of the selection process.

Study selection results

Quality assessment

The rules shown in “ Quality assessment process ” section were used to conduct a quality assessment of the selected studies. The score obtained by each study is not systematically a sign of their quality, since studies with lower scores have a different research scope but are still useful as regards answering the RQs.

Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ) specifies that some researchers use quality assessment as selection criteria in their SLRs, but it is not mandatory. Following this rule, no studies have been discarded during the quality assessment process. The aim of this SMS is to gather an exhaustive list of the available SPM tools used in GSD, and such tools may be found even in those studies with lower score.

The main motivation of this quality assessment is to provide an overview of the usefulness of the selected papers in this SMS. Results show that 75% have an average score of 2.5 points or higher. Table  5 provides information about the total score of the selected articles. Detailed scores for each of the studies selected are available in Table 9 in Appendix  1 .

Articles quality level and percentage

Table  6 shows the number of articles based on the ranking of the conference or journal in which they were published.

Articles by their journal or conference rank

RQ1: Source and channel of publications

As shown in Table  7 , 38% of the selected papers, were presented at the International Conference on Global Software Engineering and its related workshops. This result clearly shows that the ICGSE conference is the main publication source for our topic. The ranking of the ICGSE is CORE C based on the latest CORE 2013 and it is the premier conference devoted to GSD. It has attracted the attention of several renown authors. For example, the works by Lanubile et al. ( 2013 ) and Prikladnicki et al. ( 2012 ) are derived from the analysis of the articles published in this conference. With regard to journals, IEEE Software is the journal with most publications focusing on SPM tools in GSD. It is ranked Q1 in JCR and four of the articles selected have been published in it.

Publication source and channel

The main publication target for articles related to the use of SPM tools in a GSD context would generally appear to be conferences, as 70% of the selected articles have been published via this channel. Table 9 in Appendix 1 provides more details on the selected articles per publication source and channel.

RQ2: Publication distribution per year

Figure ​ Figure3 3 shows the number of primary studies per publication year. There has been a sizable increase in publications since 2006. This year corresponds to the first ICGSE conference and the increasing academic concern as regards studying the effect of globalization on the software industry; the same conclusion was reached by da Silva et al. ( 2010 ).

Number of publication per year

RQ3: Research type

Of the selected articles, 46% are solution proposals that have been derived solely from academic research. This prevalence hints that there may be a lack of existing tools with which to mitigate the effect of globalization on the software industry. In addition, 25% of the selected papers are evaluation research. Reviews represent 15% of the selected papers while another 14% represent the “Other” category, comprising opinion reports, experience papers and so on.

According to the data shown in Fig.  4 , the number of evaluation research papers is low in comparison to the number of solution proposals up until 2009. SPM in GSD is still a relatively new subject with different areas that have yet to be researched and explored. This has pushed researchers to produce several new tools that are intended for use in the GSD context (Lam and Maheshwari 2001 ; Sinha et al. 2007 ; Simmons and Ma 2006 ; Bowen and Maurer 2002 ). However, in order to carry out further research on this subject, empirical data was needed to assess the use and benefits of different tools used by project managers in GSD projects. This has led to a sizable increase of evaluation research and reviews in comparison to solution proposals.

Number of papers by research type per time period

These results can be explained using the Redwine & Riddle maturation model (Shaw 2002 ). This model stipulates that there is a trend indicating that technologies take 15–20 years to evolve from concept formulation to the point at which they are ready for popularization. The first 10 years of this evolution are spent investigating basic ideas and concepts, then developing a research community that converges on a compatible set of ideas and finally making a preliminary use of the technology and generalizing the approach.

RQ4: Research approach

The existing literature offers a relatively high number of solution proposal studies to support the management activity of GSD projects, and half of them have no empirical data to support their usefulness.

As shown in Fig.  5 , 57% (20 of 35) of the solution proposal studies included in our SMS are not validated empirically, while 31% (11 of 35) are validated through experiments. It has been noted that most of these tools are academic, showing a lack of collaboration between industry and researchers in this field. There have simultaneously been very few evaluations of the existing tools used in industry. Only eight evaluation papers are based on industrial case studies.

Research types and approaches

In our opinion, this situation may have been caused by two factors:

• SPM experiments in GSD are difficult to conduct. GSD settings imply that the subjects of the experiment must be from different geographic locations, different time zones and different cultures. This can complicate the empirical evaluation of tools in industrial environments (Šmite et al. 2010 ).
• Although some examples can be found in literature (Habra et al. 2008 ; Cuadrado et al. 2014 ), software companies are unlikely to collaborate with researchers in project management because they keep their research and tools confidential.

RQ5: SPM tools used in GSD

After synthesizing the data obtained from the selected studies, a list of 102 tools was compiled. Figure  6 displays the number of the tools retrieved from literature based on their type of license and whether they focus on one or several SPM processes. Results show that 48% of these tools are the fruit of academic research which seems logical considering that most of the literature reviewed is research related, 24.5% of the tools are free and open source software (FOSS) while the remaining 28.5% are commercial tools.

Tools by license and number of areas covered

As shown in Fig.  6 , tools focusing on a specific process (mono-activity tool) are dominant in comparison with tools focusing on several processes (multi-activity tool). For example, tools like Travis (Geisser et al. 2007 ), DPMTool (Garrido et al. 2012 ) and Microsoft Office Communicator (Niinimaki et al. 2010 ) focus on a particular process while other tools focus on several activities (see Table 12 in Appendix 2 ). Another example of a single activity tool is Atlassian JIRA (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ; Lanubile et al. 2010 ) which is considered to be an issue tracker without any other relevant features, thus focusing only on the PA process. IBM Rational Team Concert (Scharff et al. 2010 ; Treude and Storey 2012 ; Wang et al. 2012 ), meanwhile, has PP, artifact management and messaging features. In this case, it is focused on PP, CM and IM processes.

We noted that 24% of research, 17% of commercial and 8% of free tools focus on more than one SPM process. Researchers tend to create tools that cover most of the development lifecycle process. Tools like: Enabler Framework (Sinha et al. 2007 ), GWSE (Gorton et al. 1997a ), Milos ASE (Bowen and Maurer 2002 ), NextMove (Mak and Kruchten 2006 ), PAMPA2 (Simmons 2003 ), PSW (Eskeli et al. 2011 ) and SEES (Simmons and Ma 2006 ) fall into this category (see Table 12 in Appendix 2 ).

The majority of the tools listed in this study (79 out of 102) are SATs that are intended to satisfy a specific design. However, the use of SATs increases context switches, which can be a source of frustration (Sengupta et al. 2006 ). The second largest category is environment, of which there are 9. The third largest category is platforms with eight tools. Note that platforms are dominated by commercial solutions (6 out of 8). This can be explained by the effort required to develop platforms in terms of time and human resources that can barely be afforded by researchers (Sengupta et al. 2006 ). Figure  7 shows the percentage for each category. The extensive list of the tools available that have been obtained from the literature review is provided in Table 12 in Appendix 2 .

Percentage of tools by type

During the data extraction process, two entities were found to be behind several of the studies selected in this SMS. First, the Alarcos Research Group at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain authored 11 studies regarding tools used in SPM for GSD projects (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 , 2012 , 2014 ; Jiménez et al. 2009 ; Garrido et al. 2012 ; Lanubile et al. 2010 ; Aranda et al. 2006 , 2011 ; Monasor et al. 2010a , b ; Aranda et al. 2008 ; Palacio et al. 2011 ). Second, the IBM research lab, which involves researchers from India, Japan and the USA, published three papers (Sinha et al. 2006 , 2007 ; Miyamoto et al. 2012 ). IBM is one of the largest developers of solutions for SPM in GSD projects with tools like IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational Team Concert.

Considering that globalization affects countries all over the world, presenting a ratio of the selected studies per country may be enlightening in the context of this study. This ratio was obtained by using the following method: each selected study was awarded one point. This point was then divided equally between the researchers involved in the study. Finally, each country accumulated points for researchers based on the location of their affiliated entities. As an example, study (Thissen et al. 2007 ) was carried out by two researchers from the USA, one from Australia and another from India. The USA therefore obtains 0.5 of a point, Australia 0.25 and India 0.25. These results are presented in Table  8 .

Studies ratio per country

In this perspective it will be noted that the USA has the highest percentage followed closely by Finland and that European countries are heavily involved in research on this particular topic. Nonetheless, typically outsourced emerging countries like Brazil and India (Javalgi et al. 2009 ) are also contributing to this research line.

RQ6: SPM areas covered by tools

Figure  8 presents the number of tools per SPM process. It shows a disparity in the number of tools identified between the SPM processes.

Number of tools covering each SPM area

The IM process suffers the most from the effect of high distribution (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ), which is considered to be one of the top challenges regarding SPM in a global context (da Silva et al. 2010 ). This area is covered by 52 of the 102 identified tools—a little bit more than half of them. However, it is important to note that in our classification, and in contrast to other surveys (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 ; Giuffrida and Dittrich 2013 ), we consider that social software and knowledge management tools fall under the scope of the IM process. These tools generally focus on the communication aspect of the 3C Model, since they have integrated features of instant messaging, forums or wikis.

The CM process is covered by 32 tools. They are version control tools which are more focused on collaboration and concerned with the integrity of the project’s outputs (software or documents). Their prominent feature is automatic messaging, which is triggered by new version updates to alert the parties concerned.

PA and PP processes are covered by 26 and 17 tools respectively that enhance collaboration in distributed teams. Eight of these tools propose features that cover both PA and PP processes, namely: ActiveCollab (Lanubile et al. 2010 ), BaseCamp (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ), Enabler Framework (Sinha et al. 2007 ), GWSE (Gorton et al. 1997a ), Issue Player (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ), MILOS ASE (Bowen and Maurer 2002 ), PSW (Eskeli et al. 2011 ), Workspace Activity Viewer  (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ). However, six of the issue trackers considered in this study fall under the heading of assessment and control processes and are not concerned with planning, thus focusing solely on issue management, such as Atlassian JIRA (Lanubile et al. 2010 ) and Bugzilla (Lanubile et al. 2010 ).

DM, RM and measurement processes have very few tools to support their activities when compared to other SPM areas. Only three tools support RM, three tools support measurement and two tools support DM. Researchers should focus more on these areas as they are inadequately supported by proper tools. RM should particularly attract tool builders’ attention. Controlling the risks in software projects in general (Bannerman 2008 ), and global software projects in particular (Persson et al. 2009 ), greatly contributes to project success.

According to the Capability Maturity Model Integration version 1.3 (CMMI v1.3) (CMMI Product Team 2010 ), Me is considered to be a core process of the 2nd maturity level denominated as “Managed” while DM and RM are considered to be core processes of the 3rd maturity level, which is termed as “Defined”. The fact that these areas are not adequately supported by tools might indicate that SPM processes for GSD projects are not yet mature (Šmite et al. 2010 ). These projects often include ad hoc reactive processes that are unable to anticipate problems.

RQ7: 3C collaboration model comparison

The tools that have been identified have specific features that manage the challenges that high distribution poses as regards the success of GSD projects. Three key areas have been tackled by GSD tools to support group interaction, namely the 3Cs:

• Communication The tools studied integrate a number of features that are intended to reduce the effect of geographical distance and time zone differences on group awareness. These features include instant messaging, forums, e-mail notifications, audio/videoconferencing, and wikis. A total of 49 tools support communication using these features. Lack of communication is considered to be one of the key challenges when managing traditional or agile software development projects in a globally distributed environment (Dullemond et al. 2009 ). Informal communication in particular is frequently used in agile software development (stand-up meetings, face to face communication, etc.), but is, however, poorly represented. In this regard, Dullemond et al. ( 2010 ), Dullemond and van Gameren ( 2012 ) have developed a tool named “Communico” that creates a virtual open space in which users can overhear others’ conversations.
• Coordination Coordination between project actors is ensured through an improved awareness of team members’ activities. A total of 40 tools support coordination by using e-mail notifications or a dynamic visualization interface of team project members and their respective activities. Tools like ActiveCollab (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2010 ), WorldView (Prikladnicki et al. 2012 ) and Workspace Activity Viewer (Lanubile et al. 2010 ) provide an overview of ongoing project activities and give managers an overview of project status at different levels of detail. This information can be used by project managers or developers to enhance coordination and task allocation in a globally distributed software development team.
• Cooperation According to Gorton et al. ( 1997a ), the vast majority of the tools used in a collocated development context are designed to support only single-user activity, thus making the exchange of information between users more difficult. This problem is particularly frequent in the CM process in which the project metadata must be shared in a controlled manner. In this SMS, 69 cooperative tools have been identified, which makes cooperation the most prominent feature in SPM tools for GSD. The tools in this category are mainly artifact management or versioning system tools that provide a shared and distributed workspace by using either a centralized or a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture.

Figure  9 shows how many tools focus on communication, coordination, cooperation or a combination of them. For example, 49 tools have features that focus on communication, and 14 of those also focus on coordination. On the other hand 23 tools focus on communication and cooperation. Finally, eleven tools consider all sides of the 3C model, i.e., communication, coordination and cooperation. See Table 12 in Appendix 2 for more information on this subject.

Number of tools according to the 3C collaboration model dimensions

Implications for research and practice

The results of this research contribute to GSD in many ways. Firstly, they provide the academic community with a better understanding of the SPM activities and tools used in GSD settings and show gaps in the areas in which tooling is insufficient or inadequate. This information can open up opportunities for future advances by both researchers, who will better understand the landscape of GSD and tackle its challenges, and tool builders, who may wish to provide new tools that are capable of mitigating the effect of globalization on the management of software projects. Secondly, project managers involved in highly distributed projects will have an overview of the existing tools intended to support their activities and identify those which are most likely to meet their needs. The recommendations to researchers and practitioners resulting from the conclusions drawn from this SMS are as follows:

• Practitioners such as tool builders and project managers, along with researchers involved in GSD project management, are eager to know about latest research on the subject. They should view articles published in the proceedings of the ICGSE conference and its affiliated workshops. The latter is the main publication source for studies about SPM in GSD. In the same line, researchers are encouraged to send their articles to this conference.
• The results of this SMS indicate a lack of empirical validation of the various solutions proposed. Only 24.7% of the tools identified in our study have been empirically validated. A similar percentage was obtained in a previous mapping study of GSD tools (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ). Researchers are encouraged to assess their tools using experiments in order to provide qualitative and quantitative data about tool usage. In this case, we encourage geographically separated research groups with socio-cultural differences to collaborate, thus making it easier to simulate GSD experiments whilst simultaneously benefiting from the advantages of global distribution (Prause et al. 2010 ). We also encourage practitioners to collaborate closely with research groups in order to validate existing tools through case studies or surveys, thus providing useful data which tool builders can use to create tools that are capable of satisfying the demands of GSD project management.
• A number of tools that are, according to literature, intended to support SPM activities in the GSD context have been listed in this study. Practitioners, and particularly project managers, can use this list to select tools that can support their activities. License type and technology type are specified for each tool in order to ease this choice (see Table 12 in Appendix  2 ).
• Decision management, risk management and measurement processes are not adequately supported by tools when compared to the other SPM processes. Researchers are encouraged to engage in lines of research that may enable the reasons for this disparity to be discovered. Practitioners are encouraged to fill the tooling gaps in these processes.

Threats to validity

The validity of the study is concerned with the trustworthiness of its results. The conclusions of this research may have been threatened by bias resulting from the researchers’ subjective point of view. The categorization used in Runeson et al. ( 2012 ), Wohlin et al. ( 2012 ) is adopted to identify the limitations of this SMS. These limitations are classified as follows:

Construct validity

Construction validity refers to the extent to which the operational measures that are studied really represent what the RQs aim to answer. In an SMS, two factors can be easily identified as a threat to construct validity. One is the research string used, while the other is the digital libraries researched. In this study, we have performed a systematic search using an extensive range of terms to widen our scope of research. The search keywords were proposed by two authors in several iterations to ensure that all relevant literature would be included in the study. Another threat to the construct validity is the choice of digital libraries used. This risk was mitigated by the identification of three digital libraries as the main source of related articles according to existing literature. Two digital search engines were also used to provide additional sources for related articles. A manual search of the reference lists in the selected studies in order to complement the SMS is strongly suggested by Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ). This process has not been conducted and is considered to be one of the limitations of the construct validity.

Internal validity

With regard to the internal validity of the study, the classification and the decision to assign a specific tool to a specific area of project management can be judged to be subjective. Similar studies (Portillo-Rodríguez et al. 2012 ; Tell and Ali Babar 2012 ) have, for example, classified tools in a different manner and in different fields. In order to decrease this effect, the classification scheme was proposed and the categorization process was carried out by two authors while the others reviewed the final results. Moreover, the steps and activities in this scheme were clearly described to allow the conclusions drawn from the results of this SMS to be reproduced. We have attempted to decrease this threat, by displaying the data retrieved from each of the articles selected in Tables 9, 10 and 12 of Appendices 1 and 2 in order to enable interested readers to check their validity.

Conclusion validity

Conclusion validity is the degree to which the conclusions we reach about relationships in our data are reasonable and is concerned with the ability to replicate these findings. In an SMS, the threat to conclusion validity is a factor that may lead to an incorrect conclusion being reached about a relationship in the observed data. Bias as regards both selecting and classifying primary studies and tools along with analyzing data may therefore affect the interpretation of the results. In order to mitigate this threat, each step of the selection, extraction and analysis of the data was validated by means of the systematic process and the periodic reviews carried out by the researchers involved in this work. Finally, this SMS has inherited the threats to validity of its primary studies.

External validity

External validity concerns how far the results of a study can be generalized. In this case, it concerns the external validity of the tools presented. The ratio of academic tools to commercial tools, along with the fact that the selected studies included in this SMS that discuss industrial tools are written by authors who are involved in both research and industrial fields, lead us to believe that our tool list is not exhaustive and that some of the tools used in industry may not have been included. Furthermore, some details about the tools were difficult to obtain, since our tool list was indirectly built, starting from the primary studies and not from the tool’s experience. Nevertheless, the results of this study may serve as a starting point for SPM for GSD researchers and practitioners.

Conclusions and future work

This paper reports an SMS that explores how tools support SPM activities in GSD. Seventy-six studies were selected and a total of 102 tools were identified in literature and were classified according to the following criteria: license, type, SPM area they support and dimension of 3C collaboration model they focus on. During the process of this SMS, we noticed that although a large number of standalone tools are proposed, fewer tools cover the whole SPM process. A commercial platform and an environment created by international companies have been encountered during research prior to this SMS: IBM Rational and Microsoft Visual Studio. These tools have integrated a number of commercial standalone tools that collaborate and exchange information in a seamless manner, thus ensuring that the project manager’s activities are consistently supported throughout the development lifecycle.

Two studies (Sinha et al. 2007 ; Eskeli et al. 2011 ) present and advocate the use of frameworks that allow the integration of a heterogeneous number of tools in order to collaborate and exchange data while maintaining their independence. This can help project managers who cannot afford to buy expensive integrated platforms to construct their own platform using the standalone tools at their disposal. Teams collaborating on the same task and using different tools can also continue to do so, thus capitalizing on their knowledge of the tools that they are already familiar with. The first tool is called Enabler Framework and proposed by Sinha et al. ( 2007 ). Although this tool was never released, it is to the best of our knowledge the first integrating framework to be proposed in literature. The other is PSW, which was proposed by Eskeli et al. ( 2011 ) as part of the ITEA PRISMA project. The latter has been tested by the project partners, and according to their website, they have achieved major benefits without making any major changes to their tool’s infrastructure ( 2011 ).

The limitations discussed in “ Threats to validity ” section show clear paths for future work on the subject. The ability to consult other digital libraries will greatly enhance the accuracy of the results. Including more tools in the study via search methods other than systematic queries in digital libraries may also be more rewarding. A more fruitful process would, for example, be to use manual research via the Internet or to carry out surveys with collaborators from industry (de Gea et al. 2011 , 2012 ). Limited by the number and availability of the 102 identified tools, only an empirical validation of a set of tools can be conducted. A set of tools providing the most support to group interaction and covering the whole SPM process could be selected and evaluated in order to assess their usefulness for practitioners. Further investigation into the lack of tools in DM, RM and Me will be conducted to identify challenges related to GSD and a tool will be developed to counter them.

Authors' contributions

The protocol was proposed by the SYC and reviewed independently by the remaining authors. SYC and AI carried out independently the selection process based on the mapping process and merged their results to get the final list of selected articles. SYC collected the data from the selected articles and classified the tools according to available information. AI, JNR, JLF-A, JMCG and AT reviewed each a section of the final list of tools. SYC drafted the manuscript. AI, JNR, JLF-A, JMCG and AT revised the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Erasmus Mundus program Action 2: EU Mare Nostrum UE-MARE NOSTRUM (Grant 204195-EM-1-2011-1-ES-ERA MUNDUS-EMA21), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European FEDER funds through the GEODAS-REQ Project (TIN2012-37493-C03-02).

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Appendix 1 provides detailed information concerning the selected articles. The information provided is the publication source and channel in Table  10 . The year of publication, research type and approach, along with a detailed quality score for each selected article are provided in Table  9 .

Classification of selected studies, publication year and detailed quality assessment score

Publication channel and source

Appendix 2 provides detailed information on the tools that have been listed by means of this SMS, which SPM area they support, their license, their type and which of the dimensions of the 3C collaboration model they focus on. This information is displayed in Table ​ Table12 12 and the acronyms used are explained in Table ​ Table11 11 .

Acronyms used in ​ in12 12

SPM tools used in GSD

Command search queries used for IEEE Xplore

• “Document Title”:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)
• “Abstract”:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)
• “Author Keywords”:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

Command search queries used for ScienceDirect

• tak ((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

Command search queries used for ACM

• (Title:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology))
• (Abstract:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology))
• (Keywords:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology))

Command search queries used for GoogleScholar

• allintitle:((global OR distributed OR outsourcing OR located OR offshore OR collaborative) AND (software) AND (development OR engineering OR improvement OR project) OR GSD OR DSD OR GSE OR CSE) AND (tool OR technology)

Command search queries used for DBLP

Research was carried out by typing all possible combinations of the specified search query as DBLP search interface does not offer the possibility to use command search query.

Contributor Information

Saad Yasser Chadli, Email: moc.liamg@ildahcdaas .

Ali Idri, Email: [email protected] .

Joaquín Nicolás Ros, Email: se.mu@rnj .

José Luis Fernández-Alemán, Email: se.mu@namela .

Juan M. Carrillo de Gea, Email: se.mu@1gdcmj .

Ambrosio Toval, Email: se.mu@lavota .

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• Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine
• Kaitlin Srader
• Nestor Guerrero
• Carole L. Palmer

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are a seminal advance in the stewardship of Indigenous data. The Data Services for Indigenous Scholarship and Sovereignty (DSISS) project is working to guide how research libraries and data repositories can apply the CARE principles to support scholars of Indigenous culture and language. Building on a set of foundational case studies of Indigenous scholarship, this paper reports on analysis of formal engagement activities with scholars, Indigenous community members, and information and data professionals. We discuss three prominent themes—ownership, trust, and relational accountability—and their implications for concrete steps toward implementation of the CARE principles in research data services (RDS). The results show that sustaining and furthering Indigenous scholarship and data sovereignty in alignment with CARE requires infrastructure and services that attend to a mix of interrelated, and potentially divergent, interests of scholars, Indigenous communities, and institutions. RDS professionals need to build expertise in Indigenous research methods and the sensitivities and distinctiveness inherent in Indigenous ways of knowing. Stewarding institutions will need to make significant investments in restoring trust as genuine extensions of relational accountability.

• data stewardship
• CARE Principles
• research data services
• Indigenous research methods
• data sovereignty
• qualitative data

Introduction

A groundswell of activity has emerged on the ethical care of Indigenous data in response to Indigenous data sovereignty imperatives and the history of unethical research practices, data collection, and governance of Indigenous data. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance have been a seminal advance in guiding Indigenous data stewardship ( Research Data Alliance 2019 ). CARE complements the FAIR Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship ( Carroll et al. 2021 ; Wilkinson et al. 2016 ), which have been highly effective in raising awareness of data management best practices and supporting the open data movement. The catch phrase, “Be FAIR and CARE”, has worked well as an aspirational statement that balances the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) emphasis on metadata and machine-actionability with the CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) focus on Indigenous data sovereignty goals. Information and data professionals, however, still have much to learn about how to put the CARE Principles into practice.

To inform implementation of CARE for research data services (RDS) in libraries and repositories, the Data Services for Indigenous Scholarship and Sovereignty (DSISS) project is developing an Indigenous Data Services framework ( DSISS 2024 ). The strong base of work underpinning the CARE principles has been instrumental in guiding RDS for Indigenous data to date ( Carroll et al. 2020 ; Carroll et al. 2021 ; Carroll; et al. 2022 ; Carroll, Rodriguez-Lonebear & Martinez 2019 ). Much of the discourse relevant to professional RDS has emerged from scientific and health domains where data sharing and open research are often an underlying objective, and the FAIR Principles serve as an increasingly normative guide to practice. DSISS is focusing on RDS for scholars of Indigenous culture and language, contributing to understanding of stewardship for a broader range of Indigenous research data. The domain is particularly challenging since it requires RDS professionals to develop new expertise on Indigenous qualitative research methods and the data sensitivities related to Indigenous experiences and ways of knowing. It also brings into relief the needs of scholars and Indigenous communities that prioritize contextual description, preservation, and governance over data sharing or open research.

Based at the Information School at the University of Washington (UW), DSISS is led by two Indigenous researchers (Zuni/Tlingit and Navajo/Eastern Shoshone) who specialize in Indigenous knowledge, culture, and libraries and two settler researchers who specialize in qualitative data curation and repository services. Key collaborators include researchers and curators from the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR), professionals in data services librarianship from UW Libraries, and Indigenous scholars from the UW American Indian Studies department. We are consulting scholars with the Local Contexts initiative and building on their extensive experience collaborating with Indigenous communities to manage intellectual property for digital cultural heritage ( Anderson & Christen 2013 ), to explore application of their TK (Traditional Knowledge) and Collections Care notices to digital qualitative Indigenous research data ( Local Contexts 2023 ). Indigenous librarians from the X̱wi7x̱wa Library at the University of British Columbia have been active contributors, drawing on their Indigitization initiative, an exemplar partnership with First Nations communities to co-create resources for digitization and management of digital heritage ( University of British Columbia 2022 ), including an Indigenous-led, locally developed taxonomy and classification system ( Doyle, Lawson & Dupont 2015 ).

The DSISS team applies a collaborative curation approach to repository practice ( Karcher et al. 2021 ), informed by a humanities orientation to data stewardship ( Cremer et al. 2021 ; Tóth Czifra 2020 ). Most importantly, in articulating CARE implications for RDS practice, we center the concept of relationality, prominent in Indigenous research ( Kovach 2009 ; Smith 2012 ; Wilson 2008 ) and Indigenous community interests and values. Centering relationality requires an understanding that relationships exist not only through human interactions; they extend out to create a web of respect, responsibility, and relational accountability to land, water, plants, and animals, as well as to ideas, languages, ceremonies, ancestors, and future generations ( Littletree, Belarde-Lewis & Duarte 2020 ).

An invaluable body of applied work on Indigenous archiving and librarianship underpins our orientation to data stewardship. For example, the groundbreaking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives, and Information Services ( Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, 2012 ) and the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials ( First Archivists Circle 2007 ) have provided long-standing, authoritative guidance for culturally responsive care and use of Indigenous archival materials. With libraries and archives moving forward with adoption of these protocols ( Carpenter 2019 ; Marsh et al. 2020 ; Pringle 2019 ; Sanchez et al. 2021 ), there is an opportunity for adaptation and integration with new efforts on CARE implementation in RDS. Important CARE advances specific to research data include phased frameworks, data maturity models, self-assessment tools, and measurable indicators ( Taitingfong 2023 ), as well as checklists to support researchers creating documentation of Indigenous knowledge and data curators responsible for repository ingest processes ( Barness et al. 2023 ).

This paper examines how specific sub-principles of CARE relate to current scholarly practices, foregrounding the relational methods inherent in Indigenous research and prioritizing the values of Indigenous communities. We begin by describing our workshop engagement activities as a form of inquiry congruent with Indigenous research methodologies, which we consider central to determining how to apply CARE in the stewardship of qualitative research data. The results show that sustaining and furthering Indigenous scholarship and data sovereignty in alignment with CARE requires infrastructure and services that attend to the interrelated, and potentially divergent, interests of scholars, Indigenous communities, and institutions. The different scholarly perspectives demonstrate the need for multi-faceted and flexible data services to support Indigenous scholarship. The analysis also suggests a need for CARE-responsive operations beyond RDS, within special collections and other areas of academic librarianship. We conclude with discussion of the careful work required to translate CARE into practice to account for, and repair, problematic conditions embedded in our institutions.

Materials and Methods

The DSISS framework is being developed through iterative phases of participatory engagement, extending our previous work showing the need to sustain contextual integrity and relational accountability in the stewardship of Indigenous qualitative research data ( Palmer et al. 2022 ). We engage with active scholars individually and in groups to document the different kinds of data sources they produce and use, and to identify their data stewardship needs and expectations for those materials. Our engagement approach is also based in imperatives of Indigenous self-determination that privileges Indigenous knowledge, voices, and experiences, with recognition that research contributes to the thriving and survival of Indigenous people, languages, and cultural practices ( Smith 2012 ; Wilson 2008 ).

DSISS methods build on our previous experience studying research processes and data practices ( Cragin et al. 2010 ; Chao, Cragin, & Palmer 2015 ) with techniques drawn from natural resource management, where there is a similar prioritization of mutual benefits and application to practice ( Grimble 1997 ; Reed et al. 2009 ). The approach works to integrate needs and perspectives from multiple interest groups to produce relatively rapid results for prototyping or proof-of-concept pilots for further iterative input. Engagement is customized for key participants to serve as collaborators, similar to methods applied in related participatory and co-design work for development of language and culture archives ( Huvila 2008 ; Garrett 2014 ; Wasson 2021 ).

Workshop as Method

A milestone DSISS workshop brought together 24 participants with a vital range of expertise and perspectives: Indigenous scholars and local tribal experts in language revitalization; librarians specializing in data services, digital scholarly publishing, special collections, and ethnic studies; collaborators with expertise in Indigenous academic library services, qualitative data curation and repository development, and Indigenous content management and metadata; with team members specializing in Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous libraries, and knowledge infrastructures. The workshop activities were built around a set of foundational case studies of Indigenous scholarship that document current perspectives, priorities, and practices of scholars committed to ethical work with Indigenous tribes, communities, and families.

The four case studies that underpinned the workshop were shared with participants in written synopsis form and presented in plenary sessions by the scholars. Three of the cases originated with the Privacy Encodings for Sensitive Data project, funded by the Sloan Foundation, which illustrated a ‘contextual integrity profiling’ approach for developing data description for CARE compliant curation of qualitative research data ( Palmer et al. 2022 ). An additional case was developed as part of a new phase of work to include non-Native scholars who practice ethical Indigenous research with deep relationality. While all four cases contributed to the workshop, the results presented here draw on the three most uniform cases, outlined below. The one excluded case was based on research conducted by the first author of this paper, and its analytical contribution varied in several ways. Most notably, it served as a test case for a preliminary data description design (see Palmer et al. 2022, pp. 20–27 ), which is outside the scope of this paper.

• Case 1. Salish Language Research Guide. Native scholar. Documents the critically endangered Southern Lushootseed language and other Salish languages, curated across multiple tribal jurisdictions through a living document of links, words, translations, citable sources, and traditional memory. Produced in collaboration with the UW Library Special Collections.
• Case 2. Indigenous Cultural History. Native scholar. Constructs Cherokee ecological knowledge through storytelling traditions and oral history–narrative forms essential to Cherokee selfhood and cultural belonging, developed through the author’s long-standing collaboration with a Cherokee elder and family. Designed for dissemination in both print and digital format.
• Case 3. Reconnecting Archives to Indigenous Communities. Non-Native scholar. Interactive, media-rich scholarship that explores the locating and reclamation of Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw customary dance traditions, as documented historically in museum collections, and as current cultural expressions enacted by the community. Designed for dissemination in both print and digital format.

The objectives of the 2-day workshop were to identify: (1) scholar priorities based on their research methods and data practices, and (2) challenges and tractable steps for libraries and repositories to support scholar priorities through the CARE principles. All presentations and conversations were recorded for documentation and analysis, with informed consent confirmed for all participants. The analysis of coded transcripts from the small-group sessions was supplemented with context from workshop presentations and related DSISS materials. In alignment with the DSISS informed consent agreement, participants approved use of their statements from the transcripts within the context of this narrative. The full transcripts remain confidential, and the data generated for this project is only available to research collaborators. (Review by the University of Washington, Human Subjects Division, STUDY00015479, determined that the ‘proposed activity is human subjects research that qualifies for exempt status’).

The formats of engagement were crafted to be consistent with Indigenous methods. The event was held on the UW Seattle campus in June 2022 on ancestral Duwamish and Suquamish homelands. Most sessions were held in the Indigenous-designed wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ, a longhouse-style facility on campus, also known as the Intellectual House. It is a gathering place and ‘welcoming environment to share knowledge’ for American Indian and Alaska Native members of the UW community. A locally sourced Indigenous dinner, hosted at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture on the UW campus, provided additional time for participants to build relationships in an informal setting.

Parts of the program were modeled on Indigenous modes of interaction. For example, the first day began with a welcome to the territory by a Puyallup tribal citizen. Indigenous team members also initiated a relationship-focused introduction, building on an Indigenous approach to relationality. Each participant introduced themselves and briefly talked about their background, the institution they were representing, and their interests in the initiative. They ended their personal introduction by turning their remarks to another participant they knew personally or professionally, as a transition to the next introduction. Some participants told a brief story of how they met the other person or shared other personal anecdotes to illustrate knowing each other. The movement of introductions throughout the group revealed some long-standing connections and more casual or distant associations. The narrative path of the process clarified the range of people and professional perspectives in the room. It also established that group members were highly connected through a variety of channels and networks and opened up the opportunity to build new connections based on shared expertise or interests.

Case-based Interactive Activities

Scholars presented their cases in plenary sessions to build a shared awareness of a range of Indigenous research methods and data practices. The activities that followed were conducted in four subgroups aligned with the individual cases. Groups were composed to include Native and non-Native peoples and participants with varying professional roles. Anchored by the scholar presenter, each group included at least one professional librarian, one project collaborator, and a core DSISS team member.

Discussions were guided by project objectives and a set of probes designed to generate further case details associated with data stewardship:

• What data and other materials need to be preserved?
• What context needs to be documented?
• How can critical governance considerations be determined and communicated?

The probes were not explicitly framed with the CARE principles. Instead, they emphasized research materials, their contexts, and governance implications to draw attention to aspects of CARE in practice and retain the dynamics and epistemologies of scholarly intent and meaning.

The cases grounded the workshop in the primary issues of relational accountability–the need for research outputs to maintain and accurately represent interpersonal relationships with research collaborators and Indigenous communities. Relational accountability also extends to responsibility for maintaining the well-being of the natural world, stories, objects, ancestors, and future generations. The variation among the cases was instrumental in seeding session conversations that surfaced complex issues related to relationality, as well as issues of governance and control of research data.

The rich stories presented by the scholars on their research with Indigenous communities and materials revealed significant considerations for the implementation of the CARE Principles in RDS. Prominent themes emerged that foregrounded the priorities of Indigenous scholars and Indigenous communities and underscored the ethical and practical challenges of balancing the dual imperative to ‘Be FAIR and CARE.’ In addition to the three themes discussed below, two overarching dimensions were evident in the analysis. First, all the key thematic results relate to multiple CARE principles, suggesting the need for an integrative approach to CARE. The highly interdependent elements (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) cannot be, and should not be, readily disentangled. Second, the themes bring into relief the need to confront the colonial legacy of knowledge extraction and, above all else, the necessity of partnership and reciprocity with key interest groups in development of CARE-based data stewardship.

Three primary themes are discussed: (1) Ownership: complications in the determination of ‘ownership,’ (2) Institutional trust: a prevailing distrust of knowledge institutions tasked with stewarding Indigenous information and knowledge, and (3) Relational accountability: the primacy of the scholars’ positionality and accountability to the community of origin. The discussion of each theme includes illustrative excerpts from the workshop small group discussions and closes with a summary that lists key considerations and associated CARE sub-principles. The excerpts have been lightly edited for readability, framed by additional case context and interpretive discussion. The speakers represented in the excerpts include scholars of American Indian studies; language revitalization; culture and communication; Northwest art; and professionals with expertise in Indigenous services, regional collections, and qualitative data curation and stewardship.

Theme 1: Ownership

The importance of worldview as a fundamental philosophy of many Indigenous people was surfaced in Case 1 by a Native library staff member from Canada. Indigenous worldviews are holistic or ‘wholistic’ in the sense that the whole person (physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual) is interconnected to land and through relationships with others, including family members, communities, and tribal nations ( Archibald 2008 ).

Indigenous Library Services Staff: … Indigenous communities’ ethics and protocol are so much more in depth and more profound than what the university and copyrights and colonial notions of ownership are; they then put that on to our cultural belongings and our cultural entities. They don’t fully understand, and they want us to have a ‘one person has copyright over that song,’ but we don’t understand in that way; the ownership isn’t in the same way, and it’s seen within the institution as being a ‘lesser’ understanding of ‘ownership.’ Where, in our worldviews, it’s the most profound understanding of ‘ownership.’ It’s that colonial narrative—that we don’t understand the full extent that they understand –but our understandings have so much more depth to them about why it’s that way. There’s extra barriers… we would want our ethics to be the standard for the way that our relationships are held, not sprinkled on…

The Indigenous library staff member highlights the common use of colonial standards as the norm for both dominant and minoritized groups. For song ownership, the colonial perspective associates ownership with one person, as opposed to the community, which runs counter to Indigenous ways of knowing and disregards the depth and nuance of Indigenous stewardship. Further, they point out the irony in this Indigenous view of ownership being considered ‘lesser,’ even though the Indigenous conception is multi-layered and based on generations of knowledge. The cultural barriers to securing policy that privileges Indigenous values of ownership are recognized in their observations. Rather than the community’s ethical standards as guiding criteria, a superficial ‘sprinkled-on’ approach neglects community-based ethics and the primacy of the group.

Important aspects of the Authority to Control element also surfaced in relation to Case 2 in an exchange about assumptions and complexities of tribal control.

Regional Collections Librarian: Is there an actual repository? A collaboration between [the tribe] and an institution that can handle archival stuff? Is there movement within the tribe to build one?

Native Scholar of American Indian Studies: No, and that gets complicated because this is family knowledge, and we don’t want it.

Regional Collections Librarian: …subsumed by the [tribal] Nation? Native Scholar of American Indian Studies There’s issues with that, you know, it’s not what people think… cultural knowledge and governmental bodies are two different things.

Regional Collections Librarian: Of course, so that’s that a governance issue.

Native Scholar of American Indian Studies: It’s complicated because people think that the ‘go-to’ is always Tribal IRB, always check the boxes… In my community in the [tribe], it’s really always been small towns and communities with their own distinct identities…

Regional Collections Librarian: And then families within those…

Repository Expert: And does that lead to tension? Those nation’s leadership disagree with a lot of this being family knowledge?

Native Scholar of American Indian Studies: Well, yeah, sure. There’s this part of long-standing tribal politics. Who are the real [culture] bearers? Some people think the governance of the nation exists within our [ceremonial] grounds, that’s where the true governance existed. Not with the elected body that cares more about building up the financial profile of the [tribal] nation in billions of dollars in revenue. The issues of culture and tradition play a part too. People who are very ‘traditional’ versus people who are perceived as outsiders. People who are about the finances. It goes back a long, long ways.

The differing perspectives and generalized assumptions underlying this exchange show the need for a nuanced and localized understanding of the Authority to Control element. This scholar’s deep, long-standing collaboration within their own Native community is central to their Indigenous methods. They have conducted their research through a fully collaborative relationship with an elder and other family members who are the stewards of the intergenerational knowledge passed down through their family. The understanding underpinning the collaborative relationship recognizes that true governance may not lie with ‘the elected body’ but is tied to ceremonial grounds. In this case, cultural knowledge is distinct from governing bodies, with traditional ownership by a family superseding the formal governance model created after colonial contact and subjugation.

Data stewards will need to be sensitive to dynamics of family, as well as individuals, clans, and bands, and how they relate to oversight by tribal nations. The positionality of an Indigenous researcher and their application of Indigenous methods can introduce dimensions well beyond the Western model where research products fall under the ownership of an institution with an elected tribal council as the governing interface. As this case demonstrates, in addition to research institutions and tribal groups, family members can be the primary knowledge holders and, therefore, the authoritative owner.

As more and more Indigenous people become scholars and work with various members of their community, RDS professionals will encounter murky ownership situations and internal hierarchies. Even when an internal review board (Tribal IRB) process exists ( Kuhn, Parker, & Lefthand-Begay 2020 ), dynamics of family politics, leadership, and authority within Native communities may not be addressed. Each information institution will need policies and processes that help determine a course of action that accounts for negotiations with all institutional and non-institutional interest groups, toward collective benefit and relational accountability for all.

Theme 2: Institutional Trust

The distrust of Western institutions emerged explicitly and implicitly in presentations, interactive sessions, and informal conversations throughout the workshop. The historical trauma, ethnocide, and genocide that must be confronted in conducting research with Indigenous communities is not just associated with governmental organizations and policies of colonizing foreign regimes ( Pacheco et al. 2013 ; Patin et al. 2020 ). It extends to the history of unethical research methods and projects ( Smith 2012 ; Harry & Kaneche 2006 ) and the real and perceived harms introduced by gatekeepers in universities and research institutions.

Native Scholar of Culture and Communication: I know for [the elected tribal leader], he wants recordings returned to our family because they possess the [native language]. They [the holding university] have the [native language]. But the soul … that’s what’s in that original recording, and he just feels that. He doesn’t have an explanation beyond that, except that it belongs to us [the tribe]. It’s not like a possession, because it still wants to be shared. But he wants to make sure that we’re the ones who share. I tried to explain how he feels about it in terms of the community. It definitely belongs to the community, but it’s like he wants, he doesn’t want it. He wants everybody to be able to hear it, hear their songs, but he wants to make sure that they come from the [tribe]. Native Scholar of Language Revitalization: So, would he want them taken out of the university all together? Native Scholar of Culture and Communication: I think he does, yeah. I think that he thinks the university has been bad stewards, is why. Because it has. He doesn’t trust them, you know we’ve talked about it a lot, but I mean, there’s many reasons not to trust institutions, right? Native Scholar of Language Revitalization: I think [the tribal council] felt the same way. They were like, ‘We don’t trust the [university]. They just want to take take take.’ But that’s the fear in everything that everybody experienced in the past; feel like everybody just took the knowledge and didn’t provide back. And here we are trying to obtain things back, and sometimes we get those roadblocks, and so, it’s really difficult. We can’t remove that fear from them because it’s always going to be there.

This conversation conveys both historical and cultural complications associated with institutional collections and management of tribal language resources within a university library. First, there is a strong sense of ‘distrust’ based on past relationships between the tribal nation and the university, resulting in a contentious ‘bad steward’ attitude towards the university, if not the library. Second, the scholar relates that the tribal group contends that they should have the authority to control access to the language resources, not the university.

The last sentence of this excerpt is of fundamental importance to our work in the DSISS project: ‘We can’t remove that fear from them [Native people] because it’s always going to be there.’ The speaker is relaying a generations’ old sentiment of trepidation and anxiety on the part of Native peoples, researchers, and communities. Stewardship responsibility goes beyond avoiding future harms to providing benefits by recognizing fear of the Western ‘take, take, take’ institutional mindset. Implementation of the CARE Principles is a step toward allaying those justified fears if institutions proceed carefully and work directly with the Native communities for whom the data relate and have cultural value.

Theme 3: Relational Accountability

The need for relational accountability was expressed as an essential aspect of all three of the cases, as summarized at the end of this section. Here we discuss the workshop engagement around Case 3 that surfaced several important dimensions of relational accountability, stimulated by the scholar’s presentation of a video recording of a Native ceremony.

Case 3 is underpinned by research conducted many years ago by a Native researcher from the community who is understood to have enacted relational accountability as they collaborated with a non-Native scholar to document ceremonial activities. Decades later, after the data, recordings, artifacts, and other research products were disseminated and the rich context was diluted, the non-Native Case 3 scholar was enlisted by the community to assist in reclaiming their physical and intellectual property. The case shows the consistent agency of this specific tribal community. Their use of archival materials asserts and reaffirms their rights to the data originating from their village, and they are reintroducing the data to the community via local projects. At the time of data collection in the late 19th century, the tribe negotiated the terms of their engagement with the non-Native researcher, and the tribe remains engaged with deliberate and forthright negotiations about their cultural knowledge to this day.

The excerpt below represents an exchange from the perspective of a Native librarian and a non-Native scholar on showing ceremonial content at the workshop without a ‘content warning’ or cultural acknowledgement of the type of ceremony.

Indigenous Services Librarian: Okay, so I have a question as a [tribal member from a different tribe]. I’m speaking especially about stories or ceremonies that we share in our communities, and I know we have some colleagues that have kin ties to communities. I’m just thinking about how you work with open access folks that might have items that other [tribal] communities have control of and have protocols… even in my own community… stories that we may want to share and not share… Non-Native Scholar and Curator of Northwest Art So, in talking with those initiated [ceremonial group] who (…) People always say ‘well, we’re not going to tell everyone,’ ‘This is how it’s done, right, this is how I do [tribal ceremony].’ This is a narrow construct: they’re not all the same, right? I, [as a non-Native researcher], don’t come from the stance of ‘this is how you [Native communities] deal with this.’ Now, in the actual navigation [in writing my] book, things will all have titles and warnings of things that might be uncomfortable [for some]. So, I think that’s maybe what you were asking, I can’t speak for all the [Native] coauthors. We’ll have to have some conversations about that.

Content warnings are not a common consideration in many scholarly settings, and they are not standard practice in RDS. For this case, it is important to note that the particular community represented in the video does not object to the viewing of their ceremonies, and they actively assert control of their own distribution of their ceremonial imagery. However, valid arguments have been made by Native communities for limiting viewership of their ceremonial images ( Anderson 2005 ), since Indigenous viewers from different communities who hold similar ceremonial privileges may be uncomfortable with imagery deemed public by another tribal group.

The response to the video presentation of the historical ceremony demonstrates the complicated ethical considerations in handling historic materials collected using the standards of the time. More importantly, it shows the challenges associated with retaining relational accountability across a long period of time. While the historic recordings may be a point of sensitivity for individual tribal members, they were produced for the purpose of documenting dances, songs, and visual culture from their village for future use by their family, clan, and community members. It is noteworthy that while this community had direct control over which data were being collected about them, most communities have had very little if any control over data collected. It is far more typical for Native communities to have experienced extractive treatment by non-Native researchers and later be confronted with their materials being made widely available online and in print formats. The reluctance of Native communities to accept that their cultural intellectual property is up for grabs simply ‘because it’s already out there’ incorrectly assumes a lack of agency by Indigenous communities ( Belarde-Lewis 2011 ; Anderson 2009 ).

Case 3 sparked consideration of the need for extended accountability. A Native person in the workshop flagged how the images of ceremonial dances and songs may inadvertently harm the well-being of a viewer from the home community or from an adjacent community. The point was well taken by the scholar, who noted the need for further conversation with their community-based co-authors. The scholar was resolute in their responsibility to the community, confirming that it is not their intention or role to determine the best course of action for the community’s cultural property, just as the community research partners decline to be prescriptive with others in their ceremonial community.

As intended by the CARE principles, collective benefit needs to be ensured in the use of the data, with the data contributing to the rights and well-being of Indigenous people, now and into the future. Those who work with Indigenous data have the responsibility to be accountable to the originating communities, but the concept of collective benefit may have variable parameters. Considerable effort and cultural competence are necessary for researchers and RDS professionals to work with culturally sensitive subject matter in ways that respect the existing cultural protocols within a specific originating community. It becomes much more complicated when, for example, previously unknown and divergent viewing expectations or protocols emerge. Determining when and how restrictions on viewership and access are enacted needs to be defined by the Indigenous peoples from whom the data originate, while also accounting for broader audience sensitivities.

Case 3 clearly demonstrated the need for a diversity of Native voices in consultation for decisions on data representation and management. Ethical processes must ‘include representation from relevant Indigenous communities’ ( Research Data Alliance 2019 ), and RDS practice need to develop robust techniques for determining how far to reach out in identifying potentially relevant Indigenous communities.

The results above represent problems deeply embedded in our systems and institutions that now need to be addressed directly, as we develop CARE-based data systems and services. With our objectives tightly scoped to research data and Indigenous scholarly practices, we find it significant that our case studies and engagement activities continually raise issues of relationality and complexity in terms of traditional knowledge . To us, this indicates the need to recalibrate our lens to better relate Indigenous data to knowledge, as we work to extend accountability for relationships to RDS for Indigenous scholarship.

Extending Relational Accountability

Under the CARE Principles, those contributing to the data ecosystem are expected to minimize harm and maximize collective benefit and control for Indigenous people through responsible and ethical data management. Benefits range from improved governance and citizen engagement to Indigenous community wellbeing and innovation. As suggested by our case studies, many benefits are dependent on continual attention to relationality. Exchanges from Theme 3 show how the wellbeing of one community may involve data sharing that can negatively impact another community. The management of Indigenous data cannot assume pan-Indigenous agreement across communities or even within communities. As seen in Theme 1, ownership of ecological knowledge has significant relational aspects, and the interests of tribal government may not outweigh the values of individual culture bearers or families.

Historically, the authority to control Indigenous data often sat with non-Indigenous researchers and institutions that lacked relationships with community members who were thus not able to provide free, prior, and informed consent in the collection and management of their knowledge. Creating trusted data governance policies that recognize the authority of Indigenous peoples, families, and governing bodies will at times require institutions to relinquish control of some data. If data are to remain in academic institutions or data repositories outside of Indigenous control, these institutions have the responsibility to work with Indigenous communities in an open and respectful manner. However, when collective institutional distrust has built up over many decades, rebuilding relationships will take time and require incremental steps to sincerely address and acknowledge past wrongs.

Relational accountability is a commitment central to Indigenous research methodologies. At its root, accountability not only applies to Native peoples, but also to the land, ceremonies, stories, ancestors, and future generations of any Native community. When relational accountability has been intentionally developed by researchers to ensure precision in the meaning of their data and its context, stewardship practices need to retain that relationality over time, through techniques such as contextual integrity profiling ( Palmer et al. 2022 ). Additionally, the chain of responsibility for relational accountability needs to extend to the institutional curators, librarians, archivists, and repository experts caring for the data. At minimum, honest conversations about the complexity and time required to implement CARE will help RDS professionals remain ‘people and purpose-oriented’ in managing expectations of both users and institutions.

Relational Positionality of Scholars and Stewards

The scholar cases above represent three multi-faceted relational accountability positions: a Native scholar navigating longstanding historical distrust of institutions by the tribal nations whose language resources they are helping to revitalize; a Native scholar collaborating with members of their own community as culture and knowledge bearers; and a non-Native scholar invited to conduct restorative research on behalf of a tribal nation. Each of the scholars is highly aware of their positionality, how it affords them a complex understanding of the data they are generating, and the heightening of responsibility when they are researchers within their home community.

Positionality does not sit only with the researcher in relation to their data, however. Like relational accountability, positionality also extends to RDS professionals and collecting institutions as caretakers of culture, knowledge, and relational accountability. Positioning is implicated in the development and maintenance of the relationships that build the trust essential in any genuine and successful implementation of the CARE principles. Neutrality, considered by many as a core value of library professional practice, is inappropriate, misleading, and stands in contrast to the deliberate and careful process of relationship building central to Indigenous research methodologies.

Our analysis clearly highlighted the need for collaborative positioning among scholars, Indigenous communities, and collecting institutions in the development of customized protocols for long-term care of qualitative cultural data. That base needs to be built in conjunction with the established protocols for Indigenous materials in archives, where the problems and efforts to decolonize stewardship practices are well understood. Translation into best practices for research data will have the challenge of representing the relationality inherent in Indigenous qualitative research methods and the sensitivities and distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences and ways of knowing.

In the next phase of DSISS, we are extending the range of case studies of both Native and non-Native scholars of Indigenous language and culture, whose data are currently held in a research library as a condition of their funding. These cases will offer a better understanding of how implementing CARE can improve stewardship of the abundance of Indigenous data currently held in many archives and special collections. They will also provide further insight into the positionality of non-Native scholars who practice ethical Indigenous research. The larger set of cases will inform assessment and enhancement of metadata for the representation of extended relational accountability across scholars and stewards. Local Context notices offer an established starting point for visual descriptive indicators of significant Indigenous elements, but further work is needed on representing layers of relations and responsibility over time. Our contextual integrity profiling approach is a foothold that will be further aligned with emergent work on metadata standards to preserve the specificity, cultural context, protection, and ownership of Indigenous peoples’ data ( Taitingfong et al. 2023 ). Examining current stewardship conditions should also suggest paths forward in building or repairing community trust through Indigenous data literacy instruction that, for example, prioritizes trust building and reparation as a foundational area of expertise.

Our case studies demonstrate how the sub-principles of CARE function collectively to uphold relational accountability in the ethical and respectful stewardship of Indigenous data. The highly interdependent elements of CARE cannot be easily separated, indicating the holistic nature of caring for Indigenous data. Applying data stewardship practices in alignment with CARE will require a refined understanding of these interrelations and the potential tensions among the interests of scholars, Indigenous communities, and institutions. Repositories, libraries, and archives will need to confront the colonial legacy of extractive research practices that has caused the distrust of institutions by some Indigenous communities. We propose two calls to action: the first is for institutions providing research data services and the second is for Indigenous researchers.

For institutions providing RDS for Indigenous scholars and their data, we encourage honest and open dialog about the enduring legacy of colonialism, particularly as it relates to the work of information and RDS professionals. Librarians and archivists need to engage in candid assessments of the sources and reasons for the Indigenous information holdings in their care. They need to not only understand, but also acknowledge, the extractive research practices that have resulted in vast amounts of data now held in all manner of information institutions outside of Native control and authority. Identifying and naming mistrust, and the many causes for it, is a required step in building respectful relationships between tribal communities and information institutions and will contribute greatly toward implementing policy and practices with collective benefit. Transparency and acknowledgement are necessary in repairing mistrust. For example, the Society of American Archivists ( 2018 ) acknowledged that they missed the opportunity to correct past harms, publishing a formal apology for not endorsing the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials ( First Archivists Circle 2007 ). Their acknowledgment may not be adequate amends, but it is an important step that shows a willingness to evolve as a field. Establishing a new bedrock of trust will need to start with recognition of past misconduct and harms while concurrently reinforcing the development of relationships with tribes and communities represented in an institution’s collections.

The second call to action is for Indigenous researchers. We encourage their use of libraries, archives, and repositories for protecting and building awareness of their data and other research products. They will benefit from consulting with librarians, archivists, and data curators throughout the data lifecycle and by staying aware of efforts to support Indigenous scholarship currently underway. Several platforms are developing customized environments and tools to support the data needs of Indigenous researchers, including the Indigenous Data and Repositories Consortium, the Qualitative Data Repository (through their partnership with Dataverse and DSISS), and large-scale efforts such as the NIH supported RADx Tribal Data Repository. The Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, developed at Washington State University (WSU), is a longstanding example of collaborative curation with tribes to determine appropriate access to their cultural heritage and knowledge. WSU has also established a university policy on tribal engagement, consultation, and consent that guides joint research activities and specifies factors for mutual agreement related to data collection and stewardship. These and other initiatives are evolving collaborative curation approaches that engage Indigenous scholars in meaningful dialog to help increase collective benefits for Indigenous communities.

At the same time, we compassionately and humbly remind Indigenous scholars that we have never relied on any Western mechanisms to be the ‘keeper’ of knowledge for Indigenous communities. While institutions can be another place to house our language and cultural data, our systems of knowledge live within Native peoples and our relationships to land, language, ceremonies, and kin. In recognizing this, another question emerges: Can our stewarding institutions be kin? Perhaps they can move closer to an esteemed status within Indigenous networks, if Indigenous scholars readily collaborate with institutions on the platforms and tools developed, and as those institutions also make significant investments in language and culture revitalization and reclamation efforts.

Relationships take work, and there will be mistakes. Learning about the context behind the relationships, collaborations, and bonds between scholars and Indigenous communities are crucial steps. Missteps will occur, but progress can be made with honest acknowledgement of past institutional misbehavior, particularly by large and influential institutions. Indigenous scholars and tribal partners will be watching. They will see how genuine apologies are enacted and determine how to make room for acceptance. Trust can be built when Indigenous researchers and community members observe and experience ethical stewardship. We are encouraged by sincere efforts by information and data scientists, librarians, archivists, and repository developers to carefully implement the CARE Principles and to center relationality.

Throughout our case studies and workshop engagement, we witnessed the complexity of putting the tenets of the CARE Principles into practice; the concerns central to CARE were present in every case of current research, as they will be in every legacy collection of Indigenous data. As more institutions work in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and communities to responsibly enact the CARE Principles, a feasible and realistic path for others to follow will become clearer, one that fully accounts for multiple ethical expectations and genuinely generates collective benefits.

Acknowledgements

We extend our gratitude to the scholars and Indigenous community members who shared their practices, experiences, and perspectives. We thank all our collaborators and partners at the University of Washington Libraries, Syracuse University, Washington State University, and University of British Columbia.

Funding Information

This research is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Public Knowledge Program, for the Data Services for Indigenous Scholarship and Sovereignty project, grant number: G-2104-10533. We also acknowledge the Sloan Foundation for support of foundational previous research.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Author Contributions

This paper was collaboratively developed. Co-PIs Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit), Palmer, and Littletree (Navajo/Eastern Shoshone) are the primary co-authors. The three student researchers made significant contributions. Belarde-Lewis led data analysis and writing of the results section with support from Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine (Apsalooké), the PhD research assistant who was also responsible for the IRB process, data transcription, initial coding, and engagement with participating scholars on use and interpretation of excerpts. Palmer and Littletree had primary responsibility for analysis and writing of content related to their areas of expertise: Palmer on the project background and context, data practices research methods and analysis, and research library and repository service applications; Littletree on Indigenous librarianship and systems of Indigenous knowledge. As graduate research assistants, Kaitlin Srader (Navajo) and Nestor Guerrero contributed to literature reviews, data management and coding, drafting content for selected sections, editing and revision, bibliographic verification, and quality control.

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