  The allocation of tasks can be seen as a success-critical management activity
in distributed development projects. However, such task allocation is still one
of the major challenges in global software development due to an insufficient
understanding of the criteria that influence task allocation decisions. This
article presents a qualitative study aimed at identifying and understanding
such criteria that are used in practice. Based on interviews with managers from
selected software development organizations, criteria currently applied in
industry are identified. One important result is, for instance, that the
sourcing strategy and the type of software to be developed have a significant
effect on the applied criteria. The article presents the goals, design, and
results of the study as well as an overview of related and future work.
