TY - JOUR
T1 - Managing Risk Areas in Software Development Offshoring
T2 - A CMMI Level 5 Case
AU - Persson, John Stouby
AU - Schlichter, Bjarne Rerup
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Software companies are increasingly offshoring development to countries with high expertise at lower cost. Offshoring involves particular risk areas that if ignored increase the likelihood of failure. However, the offshoring client’s maturity level may influence the management of these risk areas. Against this backdrop, we present an interpretive case study of how managers perceive and mitigate the risk areas in software development offshoring with a mature CMMI level 5 (Capability Maturity Model, Integrated) software company as the client. We find that managers perceive and mitigate most of the offshoring risk areas in accordance with the findings of previous research. However, the risk area of task distribution is a notable exception. In this case, managers perceive high task uncertainty, equivocality, and coupling across sites as risk mitigation rather than risk taking. The paper discusses how and why managers perceive and mitigate the risk areas in this way and the implications for theory and practice in software development offshoring.
AB - Software companies are increasingly offshoring development to countries with high expertise at lower cost. Offshoring involves particular risk areas that if ignored increase the likelihood of failure. However, the offshoring client’s maturity level may influence the management of these risk areas. Against this backdrop, we present an interpretive case study of how managers perceive and mitigate the risk areas in software development offshoring with a mature CMMI level 5 (Capability Maturity Model, Integrated) software company as the client. We find that managers perceive and mitigate most of the offshoring risk areas in accordance with the findings of previous research. However, the risk area of task distribution is a notable exception. In this case, managers perceive high task uncertainty, equivocality, and coupling across sites as risk mitigation rather than risk taking. The paper discusses how and why managers perceive and mitigate the risk areas in this way and the implications for theory and practice in software development offshoring.
KW - Distributed Software Development
KW - Case Study
KW - CMMI
KW - Scrum
KW - Agile Methods
KW - Offshoring
KW - Risk Management
KW - Global Software Engineering
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1532-4516
VL - 16
SP - 5
EP - 24
JO - J I T T A
JF - J I T T A
IS - 1
M1 - 2
ER -