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More companies plan to expand distributed software development efforts.

The Cutter Consortium surveyed 245 software managers and developers from a varied group of software organizations last year about their distributed software development (DSD) efforts.

The survey found that the No. 1 reason (49 percent) that organizations have adopted a DSD strategy is to tap into expertise in different locations. The second most often cited reason is to lower development costs (14 percent).

An overwhelming majority of DSD projects (82 percent) are performed by teams with 10 or fewer developers. Only 9 percent of DSD projects have teams with 20 or more developers.

Thirty percent of companies said that at least half their developers are involved in DSD projects.

The two most common problems troubling DSD projects are poor communication between team members in different locations (42 percent) and overall project management problems (41 percent).

By and large, however, most organizations (65 percent) said DSD's advantages compensate for problems, and many more organizations (46 percent) expect to expand their DSD efforts in the next five years than reduce or discontinue them (9 percent).

For more information, visit www.cutter.com.

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