Global Software Engineering: Challenges and solutions

Today’s software industry is more global than ever before. The idea of developing major software systems in one location or by one single team belongs to the past. Over the past decade, research on GSE has uncovered many challenges associated with operating over physical, temporal, cultural, and linguistic distances. Unfortunately, these challenges have become even more personal to many more in 2020 due to the disruption provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown how organizations have struggled tosmoothly transition to virtual work, and while Global Software Engineering (GSE) is part of everyday life by now, succeeding in the global software industry remains challenging, with a considerable share of global projects still not meeting the expectations, especially regarding cost savings and time to market. Albeit known, distances are still causing severe breakdowns in cooperation within virtual teams and among distributed ones. As such, there is a considerable gap to fill in to establish how to manage such challenges effectively. During its 14th edition held in Montreal, Canada, on 24–26 May 2019, co-located with ICSE, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2019)1 opened a call for paper for the present JSS Special Issue with the goal of advancing research that focused on providing evidence of working solutions to the GSE challenges and needs. Both extended papers from ICGSE 2019 and original manuscripts were eligible for submission. As a result of the call, 16 papers were submitted, highlighting the interest of the international GSE research community on the topics of the special issue. After an internal review performed by the Guest Editors and the Special Issue Editor, 11 papers were moved into review and assigned to three expert reviewers selected from academia and industry. As a result of this careful review process, four high-quality papers have been accepted, resulting in a 25% acceptance rate. We take the opportunity to congratulate the authors of the accepted papers, thank all who submitted a contribution to this special issue, and all the reviewers for their precious hard work.