Software Development Process Evolution in Malaysian Companies

Abstract

GSD is a phenomenon mainly associated with the outsourcing of software development projects to some offshore company. Reduction in software development cost increased productivity and advantage of multisite development with respect to time are the main benefits that software development companies (SDCs) get from GSD. Besides benefits, a number of challenges associated with GSD are also observed. Consequently, the traditional processes to develop software are evolving and being replaced with a new set of processes which are lightweight and outcome-based. The process evolution has been deeply investigated in the context of companies mostly in Europe, Australia, USA and mainly other countries in those regions. In this regard, limited research has been carried out on Malaysian companies. The present research investigates the process evolution phenomenon in Malaysian companies. The current software development processes and the reasons for the evolution of software processes in Malaysian software companies have been identified. A qualitative approach using structured interviews has been followed for the collection of data collection and its analysis. The findings explain that software processes in most of the Malaysia companies are increasingly evolving or have been evolved. The companies are overwhelmingly adopting agile methods because of their support to GSD. Some of the companies are using ad hoc approaches for software development. The size of the company and project has been found as one of the main factors behind using ad hoc approaches. Mainly the small and medium-size companies and projects are involved in this practice.