Collaboration in global software development: an investigation on research trends and evolution

Global software development (GSD) done by geographically distributed teams of developers is one of the most common ways of developing software nowadays. Though GSD has various benefits, it also introduces challenges that have led to a plethora of research. This paper analyzes research papers published in top software engineering venues in recent years (2009--2018) focusing on team collaboration in order to understand the trend in GSD research. Out of 4,292 papers published in these venues, we found 33 papers that focused on team collaboration in the context of GSD. We study the kinds of data used in these papers and classify them into primary data (i.e., interview and observation data) and secondary data (i.e., repository and communication data) and found that interview data is the dominant type of data in these papers. We also found that the strength of evidence presented in most papers tends to be moderate.