Decision Making of Agile Patterns in Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: A Fuzzy Logic-Based Analysis

Abstract

Computation intelligence techniques are important for making decisions in an agile-based offshore software development paradigm. Offshore development faces additional challenges, such as trust, communication and coordination, and socio-cultural and knowledge transfer. There is a need to determine the rankings of challenges considering their criticality concerning practitioners working in agile-based offshore software development. This paper aims to identify and rank agile challenges in offshore software development by applying computational intelligence techniques. From the systematic literature review, we identified 30 communication and coordination challenges. The distributed agile pattern catalog consists of 15 patterns, from which eight were used to solve communication and collaboration challenges. Many researchers have used fuzzy logic to quantify their results. We further applied the fuzzy analytical technique to determine the priority order concerning the criticality of the identified agile pattern catalog. The results showed that Central Code Repository Pattern ranked the most significant for solving communication and coordination challenges. Global Scrum Board Pattern and Synchronous Communication Pattern ranked second.