Because of the distance between the dispersed development
locations, Global Software Engineering (GSE) is confronted
with challenges regarding communication, coordination
and control of the development work. At the same
time, agile software development is strongly built upon communication
between engineers and has proven its benefits,
although, mostly on one single site. As such, it might be advantageous
to combine GSE with agile development. This
blend however is not straightforward since the distributed
and agile development approaches might have conflicting
convictions. In this paper we will discuss the advantages
and challenges of combining GSE with agile development
based on a theoretical, literature-based research. The main
results presented in this paper are: (i) aspects of agile software
development, (ii) benefits and challenges associated
with these in relation to GSE, (iii) categories of technological
support for agile GSE and (iv) a framework depicting
the m...