Distributed software development of a cloud solution for collaborative manufacturing networks

Abstract

Distributed software development poses extra difficulties in terms of communication, coordination and awareness. Those difficulties usually imply more time consumption that causes productiveness reduction deriving finally in delays. So, projects where such kind of development is needed have to deal with them in order to ensure the success of the project. The case project – a research European project of the H2020 programme where participate 18 partners from 6 different countries, with three different time zones – has adopted this development approach due to its nature. The main goal of the project is to develop a cloud solution for enhancing collaboration and transparency between manufacturing companies forming a collaborative network. In order to implement it, the overall solution has been divided into several pieces, likewise micro services, having many interdependencies among them. Thus, different working teams geographically spread from different organizations have participated in the implementation, integration, verification and validation tasks. This paper explains how the case project has organized the working teams, infrastructure and procedures and practices for overcoming such problems while guaranteeing the success of the project and presents also learnt experiences and conclusions.