  Global software engineering has become a fact in many companies due to real
necessity in practice. In contrast to co-located projects global projects face
a number of additional software engineering challenges. Among them quality
management has become much more difficult and schedule and budget overruns can
be observed more often. Compared to co-located projects global software
engineering is even more challenging due to the need for integration of
different cultures, different languages, and different time zones - across
companies, and across countries. The diversity of development locations on
several levels seriously endangers an effective and goal-oriented progress of
projects. In this position paper we discuss reasons for global development,
sketch settings for distribution and views of orchestration of dislocated
companies in a global project that can be seen as a "virtual project
environment". We also present a collection of questions, which we consider
relevant for global software engineering. The questions motivate further
discussion to derive a research agenda in global software engineering.
