Offshore-outsourced software development risk management model

Abstract

Offshore-outsourced software development is gaining popularity because companies are continuously forced to reduce production costs while keeping sustainable competitive strength. However, this trend of software development increases projects' complexity and brings up risks to the overall project environment. Therefore, risks of offshore software development require to be managed as early as possible for a successful project. This paper considers a risk management model from a holistic perspective to manage offshore software development risk, integrated into early stages of development. The approach effectively identifies and specifies the goals of a project and the related risk factors. This is done at the basis of selected software development components within the running project. We show how to trace and control these risks already during early requirements engineering activities. The model at hand is implemented into an ongoing offshore software development project to (1) identify goals and risk factors from the local context and finally (2) to determine its applicability of the approach in offshore software development projects from a vendor's perspective.