Decentralized Software Development: Pitfalls and Challenges

Abstract

The talk discusses different three main threads through which monolithic and centralized software development became increasingly distributed and decentralized. One is off-shoring, in which geographically distributed teams cooperate in the development of an application. Another is component-based software development, in which two separate development cycles interact: development of component and development of the composite. A third thread is software-as-service, in which the two main stakeholders (service provider and the service client) continue to interact at run time. Each of these threads has its own potential advantages over traditional software development, but also raises fundamental concerns. The talk discusses how they stress some of the conceptually difficult aspects of software development and how they introduce new problems and difficulties that did not exist before.