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LECTURE · UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH

Global Software Management

Since fall 2025, Dr. Oliver Gausmann has taught Global Software Management at the University of Zurich’s Department of Informatics. The master’s course (3 ECTS, in English) looks at how companies organize software across sites, vendors and, more and more, AI agents, so that it creates value and accountability stays clear.

What it is about

Gartner expects worldwide IT spending of 6.37 trillion US dollars in 2026, and Mordor Intelligence puts the outsourced software development market at around 618 billion US dollars, slightly more than half of it offshore. The lecture asks how this distributed work turns into value: which delivery model fits when, how distributed teams work together, and how management and the board steer it.

DORA, the GDPR and FINMA require regulated companies, in almost the same words, to stay fully responsible for outsourced work.

Guest lectures come from industry practitioners. For the group project, students design a scenario for global software development in the near future and present it to the class.

What the lecture covers

  1. Fundamentals and delivery across sites

    The five delivery models (onshore, nearshore, offshore, hybrid, multisourcing) and the trade-off each makes between control and scale. Then the three distances between sites, Conway’s law and the tools distributed teams use for clarity, performance and integration.

  2. Governance, processes and compliance

    Governance settles, across sites, who decides, who oversees and who answers for the result. The Safe Navigation Set links policy, standard, procedure, record and evidence. Three publicly documented cases from 2023 to 2025 show controls failing at the interface to suppliers and platforms, and DORA offers a detailed template for governance across vendors.

  3. AI-augmented work in global teams

    What language models and AI agents change in workflows, roles and distributed collaboration, with agentic development and tool protocols such as MCP as the field of practice. Plus governance for teams that work with agents.

  4. Future scenarios

    Designing and assessing delivery models with human and AI contributions, by accountability, ethics and operational feasibility. Service as software is the central theme here.

What companies can take from it

  • Systems copy the communication structure of the organization that builds them (Conway’s law). Reorganizing sites and vendors therefore changes the product, and it works the other way round too: you can shape teams around the architecture you want.
  • With AI agents, control moves into the permission layer: what an agent may do, and how you prove what it did. For outsourced work, the Safe Navigation Set describes a chain of policy, standard, procedure, record and evidence.

Key facts

Format
Lecture, master’s level (MSc)
Credits
3 ECTS
Language
English
Department
Department of Informatics, University of Zurich
Assessment
Midterm exam (50 percent) and group project (50 percent)
Semesters
Fall semester 2025, Fall semester 2026

Entry in the University of Zurich course catalog

Reading list

Research foundations and legal acts as cited in the course slides.

  1. M. E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? Datamation, 1968.
  2. D. Šmite et al., Empirical Evidence in Global Software Engineering, 2010.
  3. I. Richardson et al., Global Software Engineering: A Software Process Approach, 2010.
  4. T. Hildenbrand et al., Orchestration of Global Software Engineering Projects, 2013.
  5. N. Forsgren et al., The SPACE of Developer Productivity, ACM Queue, 2021.
  6. P. Tell et al., Global Software Engineering in the Age of Cloud and AI, IEEE Software, 2022.
  7. DORA, State of DevOps Report, annual editions.
  8. GitHub, Octoverse Report, annual editions.
  9. Regulation (EU) 2016/679, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
  10. Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
  11. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Artificial Intelligence Act.
  12. ISO/IEC 27001, information security management systems.
  13. ISO/IEC 12207, software life cycle processes.
  14. ISO/IEC 38500, governance of IT for the organization.

Further reading

How distributed software delivery and AI agents create value without losing control is also available as a talk or workshop for your leadership team. Request a talk