Offshore Software Development
From Information Systems at Pitt Business
Spurred by the growth of information technology outsourcing, offshore software development firms are now playing a key role in the strategic information technology projects of their Fortune 1000 clients, and are increasingly taking part in joint product development ventures (Apte and Mason 1995; Arora 2005; Beulen et al. 2005; Carmel 1999; Mithas and Whitaker 2007). Apart from the well-documented cost arbitrage, another important factor that has been attributed to the increase in the stature of offshore software development is the dramatic improvement in the process quality and project management capabilities of offshore software service providers (Carmel and Agarwal 2002; Ethiraj et al. 2005). A significant fraction of offshore software vendors follow the tenets of normative software process models to develop applications rapidly and in a cost effective manner without compromising on quality. Indeed, the largest pool of world-wide software firms with capability maturity model (CMM) level-5 assessment in any single country are currently in India (SEIR 2007).
Work dispersion of the type that is common in offshore software development projects is vulnerable to communication, coordination, and administration problems that affect project performance (Herbsleb and Mockus 2003; Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999; Maznevski and Chudoba 2000; Olson and Olson 2000; Sarker and Sahay 2002). Although software process improvement initiatives based on normative process maturity models, such as the CMM, have been widely deployed by offshore software firms, the efficacy of such initiatives to counter the challenges of work dispersion in offshore software development remains an open empirical question. Further, while the adoption rate of structured and high maturity processes is rising among offshore software firms, prior research reports significant variance in performance improvements resulting from software process initiatives(Kitson and Masters 1993; SEMA 2002), pointing to a need to understand why some offshore software process initiatives are more effective than others.
Authors: Narayan Ramasubbu, Sunil Mithas, M. S. Krishnan and Chris Kemerer
This article was originally published in MIS Quarterly, Vol 32, No. 2, June 2008.
[edit] Abstract
In this paper we develop a learning-mediated model of offshore software project productivity and quality to examine whether widely adopted structured software processes are effective in mitigating the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We explicate how the key process areas of the capability maturity model (CMM) can be utilized as a platform to launch learning routines in offshore software development and thereby explain why some offshore software development process improvement initiatives are more effective than others. We validate our learningmediated model of offshore software project performance by utilizing data collected from 42 offshore software projects of a large firm that operates at the CMM level-5 process maturity. Our results indicate that investments in structured processes mitigate the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We also find that the effect of software process improvement initiatives is mediated through investments in process-based learning activities. These results imply that investments in structured processes and the corresponding process-based learning activities can be an economically viable way to counter the challenges of work dispersion and improve offshore project performance. We discuss the implication of these results for the adoption of normative process models by offshore software firms.
[edit] Keywords
Offshore software development, capability maturity model, software project performance, software engineering, software productivity, software quality, distributed teams, global service disaggregation
