Towards an ontology for global software development

Abstract

As planning an R&D project named ORIGIN addressing global software development (GSD) foundations, the authors soon became aware of the need for all the participants to share the same vision of GSD projects. The authors therefore reached the conclusion that one of the first steps should be to set up a shared and consistent GSD project-related vocabulary, since this would help to improve communication between the five companies involved in ORIGIN. After analysing existing GSD initiatives, the authors discovered that none of them really satisfied our specific needs. As a consequence, they decided to develop a new ontology, which was named O-GSD. This paper describes not only how the ontology was developed -including the reasons which led us to include each term in O-GSD- but also its usage in real contexts -what allowed us to extract some insights to refine and validate the ontology. The main contribution of this paper is the O-GSD ontology which is used and to be used in real GSD projects with the aim of helping project managers to better describe their particular GSD projects.