SWOT: Strength,weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for scaling agile methods in global software development

Nowadays, software organizations are deploying agile methods in the geographically distributed environment to get several benefits i.e. significant return on investment it produces, fast project delivery, and managing the dynamic behavior of the project development. The execution of agile practices in Global Software Development (GSD) is more complex than collocated environment (single site development). The objectives of this study is to explore the factors which positively and negatively impact on scaling program of agile development in the GSD context and propose a framework based on the factors for successful scaling of agile programs in GSD context. This study is carried out in two stages. In the first stage, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol was adopted to investigate the factors. In the second stage, the SWOT analytical framework was followed to classify the factors into four categories: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. In the SWOT framework, the factors in strengths and weaknesses categories represent the internal aspects of the organizations while the opportunities and threats categories indicate the external aspects of organization. The findings of this study reported 24 factors. The identified 13 factors positively and 11 factors negatively impact on scaling program of agile development respectively. Moreover, a framework based on SWOT analysis is proposed that provided the classification of factors into four categories. Based on the research outcomes, we can conclude that the identified factors and their classification intoSWOT categories provide a robust framework that will assist the agile practitioners for successfully scale agile development in the GSD organizations.