A Reference Architecture for Providing Tools as a Service to Support Global Software Development

Global Software Development (GSD) teams encounter challenges that are associated with distribution of software development activities across multiple geographic regions. The limited support for performing collaborative development and engineering activities and lack of sufficient support for maintaining and resolving dependencies and traceability across heterogeneous tools are major challenges for GSD teams. The lack of insufficient support for cross platform tools integration also makes it hard to address the stated challenges using existing paradigms that are based upon desktop and web-based solutions. The restricted ability of the organizations to have desired alignment of tools with software engineering and development processes results in administrative and managerial overhead that incur increased development cost and poor product quality. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the projects have specific constraints regarding availability and deployments of the tools. The artifacts and data produced or consumed by the tools need to be governed according to the constraints and corresponding quality of service (QoS) parameters. In this paper, we present the research agenda to leverage cloud-computing paradigm for addressing above-mentioned issues by providing a framework to select appropriate tools as well as associated services and reference architecture of the cloud-enabled middleware platform that allows on demand provisioning of software engineering Tools as a Service (TaaS) with focus on integration of tools.