Suitability of Extreme Programming for Global Software Development

This study aims at investigating the benefits and challenges associated with the combination of XP and GSD both in the research literature and in practice. The study also explores practices or solutions adopted in order to address the challenges of XP-GSD combination. Moreover, this study compares challenges of XP-GSD combination with the traditional GSD challenges. This research study has been accomplished with the help of a systematic literature review (SLR) and an industrial survey. For the systematic review, the snowballing approach was applied, and an initial set of papers was selected from IEEE Xplore and Google Scholar. Through SLR, we have identified 21 benefits, 17 challenges, and 18 solutions to the identified challenges. The scarcity of research literature in the area suggests that more work needs to be done to successfully implement XP in GSD projects. The benefits and challenges extracted from literature and industry suggest that the application of XP can be beneficial for GSD since the majority of the reported challenges are traditional GSD challenges.Based on the results, we conclude that XP can be successfully adopted in GSD projects.