Offshore Software Development Research Articles

The role of peripheral vendors in enhancing the absorptive capacity of offshore software development teams in challenging institutional environments

This study aims to elucidate how vendors located at the periphery facilitate the advancement of offshore software development (OSD) teams' absorptive capacity (AC) despite the unfavourable skill environment prevalent in their home country. Current research does not explain whether and how vendor teams located at the periphery respond to adverse skill environments and contribute towards OSD teams’ AC in spatially distant linkages with international clients at the core. Using an inductive approach, this study developed a conceptual framework that outlines how vendor teams at the periphery acquire the “need knowledge” embedded in the context of clientele teams and subsequently transfer “solution knowledge” to international clients. Our findings highlight the importance of recursive interaction between the periphery vendor team, client teams, external agents, global experts, consultants, and incubators that facilitate this process. All these actors co-drive the AC process whereby periphery vendor teams are not just recipients of knowledge but also contributors of knowledge towards international clients in core regions.

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

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.

Offshoring software development: india/china choice a transaction costs perspective

The purpose of this paper is to interpret the decision to choose a country to entrust its service providers with the software development activity. Based on transaction cost theory, the cost measurement waxes derived from this theory are used to compare two competing countries in the Offshore market: India and China. Salary, ICT, language, trust and economic and institutional stability are the points of differentiation on which this study is based. By using an exploratory and a comparative study based on secondary data from different statistical sources, the study confirms that according to the TCT, India remains a more appropriate choice than China for client firms seeking to outsource software development activity. This paper is completely original and proposes a new research component that links TCT predictions with the country chosen as a part of Offshore’s strategy.

A flexible framework for requirement management (FFRM) from software architecture toward distributed agile framework

Abstract GSD is a Global software development environment where data are distributed to more than two sites. These sites may be located on national or continental borders. Every year it expands its development volume, which has become a trend for the software development business. Because of increasing demand, it has become a common type of business. The value of offshore software development has increased immensely. According to the recent predictions, one-quarter of US software-related business shifts offshore, including integration and management-related services. GSD helps explore resources from other countries, increasing knowledge and enhancing operational efficiency. Therefore, globalization has changed the development nature of software. Different organizations face several challenges, such as coordination and requirement ambiguity, during the change management process in GSD. Traceability accommodates these changes in forward and backward direction. However, it gives rise to several challenges like less client involvement because of its distributed nature and challenging to manage the requirement ambiguity due to increased cost. Therefore, the Flexible Framework for Requirement Management (FFRM) must handle the abovementioned issues.

A Conceptual Model to Address the Communication and Coordination Challenges During Requirements Change Management in Global Software Development

Global Software Development (GSD) is a widely used development practice because of various advantages offered to the customers, vendors, and other stakeholders involved in a software project development. However, GSD is not a simple process as it faces multiple challenges that arise due to the mismanagement of the communication and coordination process. Meanwhile, Requirements Change Management (RCM) is a tedious and high resource-consuming process in GSD, which is further negatively affected by the poorly managed communication and coordination mechanisms. Multiple research studies have presented various theoretical and conceptual models to overcome the challenges during RCM in the GSD context. However, the current methodologies lack in handling the communication and coordination challenges during the RCM process in the GSD context. In the literature, the researchers have concluded that a conceptual model can effectively reduce the communication and coordination challenges during RCM in GSD. Inspired by this, the current work aims at proposing a conceptual model to overcome and mitigate the communication and coordination challenges, while ensuring the effective requirement changes at offshore software development sites. Moreover, it would help multiple stakeholders in understanding and managing the necessary resources before initiating the RCM process. To validate the proposed conceptual model, we have conducted a questionnaire-based survey to procure the results from the industrial experts working in the GSD domain. After analyzing the obtained results, we found that the proposed conceptual model is effective to handle the communication and coordination challenges up to 87%. In addition, almost 87% of the experts have agreed upon the correctness, identified challenges, and the mitigation practices in the proposed conceptual model necessary to improve the RCM process in the GSD context. Furthermore, it was observed that 75% of the experts also agreed upon the practical implementation of the proposed conceptual model in the software development industry to observe the heuristic performance of the proposed conceptual model.

Factors influencing the requirements engineering process in offshore software development outsourcing environments

Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is one of the popular development paradigms in the software industry. There are a number of challenges associated with OSDO including the challenges related to requirements engineering (RE) process. The objective of this study is to identify success factors (SFs) associated with RE processes in the OSDO context. A total of 25 SFs were identified using systematic literature review (SLR) and the identified SFs were further validated with practitioners using a questionnaire-based survey. The authors also examined the identified RE challenges with respect to their relevance for different organisation types (client and vendor) and sizes (small, medium, and large) with an aim to provide a clear understanding of the RE process and its SFs in the context of various OSDO organisations. They also conducted a comparative analysis between the SLR and questionnaire findings and the results indicate that there is a moderately positive correlation between the data sets. They believe that the findings of this study will provide a comprehensive model to help OSDO organisations assess and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their RE activities.

Critical Barriers in Software Outsourcing Vendor Organizations and Their Impacts on Software Outsourcing Clients: A Systematic Literature Review

Globalization and technological advancement have driven up the demand for software as many enterprises seek to gain a competitive edge through efficient business operations. Whereas software provides this capacity, the resources involved in software development sometimes provide a stumbling block, especially for startups and smaller businesses. Software development outsourcing or offshore software development offers a viable alternative for these enterprises. Software development outsourcing is a contractual agreement between a client and vendor organization (s), who then provide part or all of the software development related services at an agreed fee paid by the client. Despite the apparent importance of offshore software development, there is limited research literature that explores the general practices in software development outsourcing. Besides, identifying barriers that often present a significant challenge for client organizations has received a little interest from researchers. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of 68 research articles to identify the critical barriers for offshore software development outsourcing vendors. In order to increase the internal validity of the reported findings, the articles selected for the review were taken from three continents; Africa, Asia and Europe. The critical barriers established from the study included communication problems, cultural barriers and incompatibility with the client’s requirements. From the findings, it is recommended that vendors address these barriers for an improved relationship between themselves and the clients. Moreover, addressing these barriers offer the vendors with an opportunity to position themselves strategically within the offshore outsourcing industry. Furthermore, the findings provide meaningful literature in the continuum of Software Development Outsourcing for Software project managers, researchers and other participants in the field. More importantly, the presented literature offers a starting point for generalizing the reported findings within the context of Software Development Outsourcing.

The impact of personality traits and knowledge collection behavior on programmer creativity

Context: Creativity is one of the essential ingredients in successful software engineering. However, majority of the work related to creativity in software engineering has focused on creativity in requirement engineering. Furthermore, there are very few studies that examine programmer creativity and the impact of individual and contextual factors on it. Objective: The objective of the study is to analyze the impact of the big five personality traits including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience, as well as knowledge collection behavior on a programmer's creativity intention. Method: A quantitative survey was conducted and data from 294 programmers, working in offshore software development projects, was collected. The data was later analyzed using Smart-PLS (3.0). Results and Conclusions: The results indicated that openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness and knowledge collection behavior positively predicted a programmer's creativity intention. On the other hand, neuroticism negatively predicts creativity intention of the programmer. The study also concluded that all of the independent variables, except the agreeableness trait, significantly predict creativity intention which in turn significantly predicts creativity. As a result, our conclusions indicate that programmer's personality traits and knowledge collection behavior play a key role in shaping their intention to be creative. Hence, personality traits and knowledge collection behavior should be given due attention during the hiring process of creativity-oriented software companies.

Prioritizing Management Success Factors in Offshore Software Development

A number of organizations have adopted offshore software development (OSD) practices to support their software development in terms of reducing time to market, access to technical talent and lower costs. There is a lack of understandings of the factors associated with successful management of OSD projects. The objective of this study is to identify and prioritize the factors that contribute to successful management of OSD projects. First, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify a set of factors that influence successful management of OSD projects. Second, a questionnaire survey was developed based on the findings of the SLR to collect feedback from industry practitioners. Finally, we prioritized the success factors using the analytic hierarchy process. In total, 36 success factors were identified. Findings of the study indicate that standards and procedures, change management engineering and trust building between distributed teams are key factors for the successful execution OSD projects.

An empirical Study Investigation of Task Allocation Process Barriers in the Context of Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: An Organization Size Based Analysis

This research presented a holistic approach in determining the trade-off optimized Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) tunings for both servo and regulatory controls of the cascade control loop by using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Performance of GA-based PID tunings was significantly compared with the IMC-based single loop tunings and conventional cascade control tunings. GA-based PID tunings eliminated the complicated mathematic calculations in obtaining the correlation PID tuning values and also reduce the dependency on engineering knowledge, experience, and skills. The performance of transient and steady-state responses was compared through time domain specification, performance index, and process response curve. It is concluded that the GA-based PID tunings for the cascade control loop had produced the best result for both servo and regulatory control objectives, which is eventually determined.

Realm for Metamorphose Management in Software Requirements for global Software progress Environment

Recent outsourcing /off-shoring software development practices testify that any development done without a proper sharing mechanism leads to the generation of inconsistent information, which further results in an undesired, error-prone software. Further, with the business process automation, a significant way to minimize human effort involves various development, support and maintenance activities to reuse available information. Thus, reusing and sharing information in a standardized way is the key operative challenges which foster the need to identify and exploit novel knowledge-based frameworks. Those recommended research gives a tool-based answer for mechanize those programming documentation transform utilizing ontologies. This multi-phase schema need in general six stages the place every period yield contributes of the last robotized documentation. Should assess the degree for robotized documentation it is looked at utilizing spare and more open wellspring programming known as WCopyfind of the existing manual documentation to an after effect administration framework research endeavor. Preliminary Outcomes indicate a most noteworthy mechanization from claiming 60 percent, which will be plainly foremost.

An Evaluation Framework for Communication and Coordination Processes in Offshore Software Development Outsourcing Relationship: Using Fuzzy Methods

Offshore Software Development Outsourcing (OSDO) is a modern business strategy for producing high quality software at low cost. OSDO refers to the practice of contracting to an offshore (extrinsic) organization to perform some or all software development work of a product. For the benefit of OSDO vendors, the present research aims to develop a “Communication and Coordination Challenges’ Mitigation Model” (CCCMM) that provides solutions for unambiguously defined communication and coordination processes in a global software development (GSD) environment. Our proposed model is based on the fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making (FMADM) approach incorporating the capability of group decision making. FMADM approach is used both in ranking of survey and assessment of case studies. Firstly, authors undertook a systematic literature review (SLR) that identified all cited challenges from a set of 101 articles. We identified eighteen problem areas faced by GSD vendors in OSDO relationships. Of these, six were ranked as critical. For the purposes of identifying corrective interventions, a second SLR was conducted that revealed 75 remedial measures extracted from 63 chosen articles. To validate our SLR findings, we surveyed 42 outsourcing experts from six countries. We also categorized six critical challenge areas and 75 corrective practices into four mitigation levels based on CMMI, SOVRM and SOPM. In addition, two case studies were conducted to evaluate CCCMM outcomes in OSDO companies. The assessment results of first case study do not recommended Company-A for successful implementation of level-2 of CCCMM, so Company-A stands at level 1. We have observed from second case study that Company-B has implemented all the critical challenges of the level-2 only; therefore Company-B is at level-2 success of the proposed assessment model.

Towards the Successful Requirements Change Management in the Domain of Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: Preliminary Results

Towards the Successful Requirements Change Management in the Domain of Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: Preliminary Results

An empirical Study Investigation of Task Allocation Process Barriers in the Context of Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: An Organization Size Based Analysis

An empirical Study Investigation of Task Allocation Process Barriers in the Context of Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: An Organization Size Based Analysis

Fair comparison of developing software in different locations: dynamic decision model

While offshore software development is frequently looked at in simple economic terms, assumed benefits are not always achieved. This can be attributed to unexpectedly high transition costs and a number of extra costs for maintaining a sourcing strategy. When offshoring fails, companies need to revisit their decision. In this paper, an analytical model is proposed to support evaluation of offshoring strategies and decision options. The model focuses on value comparison, and treats outcomes of offshoring relationships more fairly and realistically than a naive salary comparison. The model is a development of models with extensions motivated by lessons learned from two empirical cases. The model is designed to consider more decision outcomes than previously suggested. In contrast to current practice focusing on economic profits from the salary differences between onshore and offshore, we focus on the differences between expected and realised outcomes by analysing strategic benefits created by options and measuring the same time-value. Finally, consequent decision situations provide a dynamic view on supporting chains of decisions.

Fair comparison of developing software in different locations: dynamic decision model

While offshore software development is frequently looked at in simple economic terms, assumed benefits are not always achieved. This can be attributed to unexpectedly high transition costs and a number of extra costs for maintaining a sourcing strategy. When offshoring fails, companies need to revisit their decision. In this paper, an analytical model is proposed to support evaluation of offshoring strategies and decision options. The model focuses on value comparison, and treats outcomes of offshoring relationships more fairly and realistically than a naïve salary comparison. The model is a development of models with extensions motivated by lessons learned from two empirical cases. The model is designed to consider more decision outcomes than previously suggested. In contrast to current practice focusing on economic profits from the salary differences between onshore and offshore, we focus on the differences between expected and realised outcomes by analysing strategic benefits created by options and measuring the same time-value. Finally, consequent decision situations provide a dynamic view on supporting chains of decisions.

An Evaluation Framework for Communication and Coordination Processes in Offshore Software Development Outsourcing Relationship: Using Fuzzy Methods

Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is a modern business strategy for producing high-quality software at a low cost. The OSDO refers to the practice of contracting to an offshore (extrinsic) organization to perform some or all software development work of a product. For the benefit of the OSDO vendors, this paper aims to develop a “communication and coordination challenges mitigation model” (CCCMM) that provides solutions for unambiguously defined communication and coordination processes in global software development (GSD) environment. Our proposed model is based on the fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making (FMADM) approach incorporating the capability of group decision-making. The FMADM approach is used both in the ranking of survey and assessment of case studies. First, the authors undertook a systematic literature review (SLR) that identified all cited challenges from a set of 101 articles. We identified 18 problem areas faced by the GSD vendors in OSDO relationships. Of these, six were ranked as critical. For the purpose of identifying corrective interventions, a second SLR was conducted that revealed 75 remedial measures extracted from 63 chosen articles. To validate our SLR findings, we surveyed 42 outsourcing experts from six countries. We also categorized six critical challenges and 75 corrective practices into four mitigation levels based on CMMI, SOVRM, and SOPM. In addition, two case studies were conducted to evaluate CCCMM outcomes in OSDO companies. The assessment results of the first case study do not recommend Company-A for the successful implementation of level-2 of the CCCMM, so Company-A stands at level-1. We have observed from the second case study that Company-B has implemented all the critical challenges of the level-2 only; therefore, Company-B is at level-2 “success” of the proposed assessment model.

2111 オフショア開発リスク対応事例 : 中国と日本双方から見たオフショア開発の課題と対応事例(一般セッション)

2111 オフショア開発リスク対応事例 : 中国と日本双方から見たオフショア開発の課題と対応事例(一般セッション)

Critical challenges in managing offshore software development outsourcing contract from vendors' perspectives

Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is a Global Software Engineering paradigm for developing high quality software at low cost in low-wage countries; where client organisation contracts out all or part of software development activities to vendor organisation. The vendor organisation provides the agreed software development work in return for remuneration. The objective of the research is to identify critical challenges faced by vendor organisations in management and execution of OSDO contract, and to analyse the identified challenges based on the variables such as time/year and organisational size. The authors have used systematic literature review for the identification of the challenges in OSDO contract. They have identified that 15 challenges faced by vendors in OSDO contract. Amongst these, nine challenges were marked as critical challenges. They have further analysed the identified challenges based on different variables such as organisational size, time and correlation analysis.Vendor organisations should concentrate on addressing the identified critical challenges such as `lack of project management', `poor monitoring system', `lack of outsourcing relationship management', `cultural and linguistic issues', `non-competitive price', `intellectual property rights (IPR) and regulatory issues', `failure to manage end-user expectation', `lack of negotiation strategies' and `unforeseen contingencies' for successful outcome of OSDO contract.

オフショアソフトウェア開発プロジェクトにおける要員の現地派遣の効果 コンピュータ・シミュレーションによる工期短縮効果の検証

オフショアソフトウェア開発プロジェクトにおける要員の現地派遣の効果 コンピュータ・シミュレーションによる工期短縮効果の検証