Offshore Software Maintenance Outsourcing Process Model Validation: A Case Study Approach

Abstract

The successful execution and management of Offshore Software Maintenance Outsourcing (OSMO) can be very beneficial for OSMO vendors and the OSMO client. Although a lot of research on software outsourcing is going on, most of the existing literature on offshore outsourcing deals with the outsourcing of software development only. Several frameworks have been developed focusing on guiding software system managers concerning offshore software outsourcing. However, none of these studies delivered comprehensive guidelines for managing the whole process of OSMO. There is a considerable lack of research working on managing OSMO from a vendor’s perspective. Therefore, to find the best practices for managing an OSMO process, it is necessary to further investigate such complex and multifaceted phenomena from the vendor’s perspective. This study validated the preliminary OSMO process model via a case study research approach. The results showed that the OSMO process model is applicable in an industrial setting with few changes. The industrial data collected during the case study enabled this paper to extend the preliminary OSMO process model. The refined version of the OSMO process model has four major phases including (i) Project Assessment, (ii) SLA (iii) Execution, and (iv) Risk.