Methodology Fit in Offshoring Software Development Projects

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-81
Author(s):  
Peng Xu ◽  
Yurong Yao

Offshoring has become a viable alternative for companies to lower software development costs and leverage labor resources worldwide. To achieve success in offshoring software development projects, a vendor must choose appropriate development methodologies. This study aims to examine how methodology fit affects offshoring project performance. It proposes that methodology fit affects project performance through interfirm knowledge sharing between vendors and clients. In addition, the impact of methodology fit on knowledge sharing is dependent on relational capital between vendors and clients. A survey was conducted among software companies in China that provide offshoring services. 108 completed questionnaires were collected. The results confirm this article's hypotheses.

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
Peng Xu ◽  
Yurong Yao

Offshoring has become a viable alternative for companies to lower software development costs and leverage labor resources worldwide. To achieve success in offshoring software development projects, a vendor must choose appropriate development methodologies. This study aims to examine how methodology fit affects offshoring project performance. The authors propose that methodology fit affects project performance through interfirm knowledge sharing between vendors and clients. In addition, the impact of methodology fit on knowledge sharing is dependent on relational capital between vendors and clients. A survey was conducted among software companies in China that provide offshoring services. 108 completed questionnaires were collected. The results confirm the authors' hypotheses.


Author(s):  
R. B. Lenin ◽  
S. Ramaswamy ◽  
Liguo Yu ◽  
R. B. Govindan

Complex software systems and the huge amounts of data they produce are becoming an integral part of our organizations. We are also becoming increasingly dependent on high quality software products in our everyday lives. These systems ‘evolve’ as we identify and correct existing defects, provide new functionalities, or increase their nonfunctional qualities - such as security, maintainability, performance, etc. Simultaneously, more software development projects are distributed over multiple locations (often globally) and are often several millions of dollars in development costs. Consequently, as the Internet continually eliminates geographic boundaries, the concept of doing business within a single country has given way to companies focusing on competing in an international marketplace. The digitalization of work and the reorganization of work processes across many organizations have resulted in routine and/or commodity components being outsourced.


2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jungwoo Lee ◽  
Hyejung Lee ◽  
Jun-Gi Park

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the mechanism through which empowering leadership of a team leader might influence the team performance in IT service. Design/methodology/approach – The data of 315 individuals collected from 85 different IT projects through online survey is used to empirically test the hypotheses. Findings – The results confirm that team leader′s empowering leadership raises the level of knowledge sharing among team members and increase the absorptive capacity of the team, and lead to better team performance. Research limitations/implications – This research theoretically presented and demonstrated the middle- and long-term impacts of empowering leadership resulting from the development of absorptive capacity as the effects of knowledge sharing in an IT project team are produced through absorptive capacity. Practical implications – The findings indicate that more effective in increasing the performance of IT project teams can be to strengthen empowering leadership than to promote traditional charisma or directive leadership. Knowledge sharing at a team level has the direct effect of improving project performance by providing information and knowledge regarding the related project, but on the other hand it contributes to making stronger the path of associating absorptive capacity with project performance. Originality/value – The impact of empowering leaderships on team performance of IT project has received less research attention. Little prior research has carried out such an integrated analysis in IT service context. This study contributes to knowledge management research by identifying a key antecedent of knowledge sharing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 02 (02) ◽  
pp. 1750007
Author(s):  
Taiga Mitsuyuki ◽  
Kazuo Hiekata ◽  
Takuya Goto ◽  
Bryan Moser

For software development, especially massive software systems, a waterfall process is used traditionally. A waterfall process can be highly effective on the condition that a master plan is fixed and the possibility of changes and uncertain rework is low. However, in software development projects, many kinds of reworks occur corresponding to uncertain requirement changes and program bugs. In addition, with the advent of cloud-based software platforms and continuous development operations, it is possible to develop a software system while operating the system. To respond to this situation, software development projects often adopt an agile process. Agility may allow conditional response to uncertain rework, yet at the same time it may be difficult to control the achievement of known project targets. Recently, many cases of adopting mixed processes including waterfall and agile have been reported in the massive software development projects. In this paper, we argue that the mixed process architecture should be designed, considering the scale of the targeted software project, the culture of organization, the probability of uncertain requirement changes, and so on. This paper proposes a methodology of evaluating the impact of waterfall, agile, and mixed project architectures by using process simulation. A project architectural approach is evaluated with a simulator which includes a software reliability growth model and uncertain rework driven by requirement change and error propagation. The proposed methodology was applied to a development project for a simple shopping website. The results showed that the proposed methodology allows exploration of partial agile adoption depending on the nature of the system development project, including its scale and chances of change. For example, in this paper, if the scale of the project is small, the positive effect of increasing agility by adopting agile processes is low. On the other hand, if the scale of the project is large, the effect of increasing agility by adopting agile process can increase. Furthermore, it became clear that it is important to not apply an agile process blindly, but instead to design a mixed project architecture considering the number of errors and development schedule targets across the project scope.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yusuf Sulistyo Nugroho ◽  
Syful Islam ◽  
Keitaro Nakasai ◽  
Ifraz Rehman ◽  
Hideaki Hata ◽  
...  

AbstractAlthough many software development projects have moved their developer discussion forums to generic platforms such as Stack Overflow, Eclipse has been steadfast in hosting their self-supported community forums. While recent studies show forums share similarities to generic communication channels, it is unknown how project-specific forums are utilized. In this paper, we analyze 832,058 forum threads and their linkages to four systems with 2,170 connected contributors to understand the participation, content and sentiment. Results show that Seniors are the most active participants to respond bug and non-bug-related threads in the forums (i.e., 66.1% and 45.5%), and sentiment among developers are inconsistent while knowledge sharing within Eclipse. We recommend the users to identify appropriate topics and ask in a positive procedural way when joining forums. For developers, preparing project-specific forums could be an option to bridge the communication between members. Irrespective of the popularity of Stack Overflow, we argue the benefits of using project-specific forum initiatives, such as GitHub Discussions, are needed to cultivate a community and its ecosystem.


Author(s):  
Mohammed W. Shbair, Wael F. AlSarraj, Khalid M. Kahloot

Factors of success are aimed to provide knowledge-intensive organisations to better manage their knowledge value. There are multiple ways to capture organization’s knowledge and make it available to all their members while it is not easy to capture/share the tacit knowledge among the stakeholders. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of factors of success on the in-house software development for preserving tacit knowledge. We conducted a survey to study the impact of these five factors on the tacit knowledge sharing between the developers within the in-house software development environment. This paper is firstly exploring the definition of the knowledge and introducing the types of knowledge those are explicit and tacit knowledge. We discuss the in-house software development concept in which the non-IT organizations may need to develop their own software internally with no need to have a third party software development organization. For tacit knowledge sharing, we considered four factors reviewed in other researches and we added to them the pair programming as a practice. Case study is local bank in Palestine. Based on the results we have, it is confirmed the hypothesis of a positive impact of factors of success on the process of knowledge sharing.


Author(s):  
Lucas Thulani Khoza ◽  
Kelvin Joseph Bwalya

In order to achieve agility in software development, there is a need to ensure that the knowledge generated is seamlessly shared among the teams involved. Different contexts face unique contextual motivators and challenges towards achieving efficient knowledge sharing in software development firms. Overcoming these challenges starts from understanding the contextual nuances at play in the environment, in which knowledge sharing is desired. With increased need for ubiquitous and on-the-go information needs in agile software development projects, understanding the need for effective knowledge sharing platforms is important. The general scarcity of empirical studies has culminated into lack of in-depth global or local insights on knowledge sharing. This research investigates the different contours of knowledge sharing in a software development context in South Africa. Quantitative data collected using a questionnaire with closed-ended questions were analysed using an interpretive and deductive approach. Findings of this research reveal that job security, motivation, time constraints, psychological factors, communication, resistance to change, and rewards are core factors for knowledge sharing in software development projects. Compared with the global context, this research is aligned with other findings with new additions on the grouping of factors influencing knowledge sharing in software development projects. The study discusses the types of knowledge considered useful to share, presents appropriate ways of sharing such useful knowledge and articulates how different types of knowledge are shared in the South African context. This research contributes to the current debate on challenges in knowledge sharing within software development projects in developing world contexts and discusses how software development companies may ensure that triple constraints (time, cost and scope) are overcome.


Author(s):  
Alexander Baumeister ◽  
Markus Ilg

There are numerous forecast models of software development costs, however, various problems become apparent in context to practical application. Standardized methods, such as COCOMO II have to be calibrated at an individual operational level on the basis of the underlying database. This paper presents a new activity based approach that is based on business specific cost data that can be easily integrated into existing management accounting systems. This approach can be applied to software development projects based on the unified process in which activity driven budgeting promises several advantages compared to common tools in use. It supports enterprise specific cost forecasting and control and can be easily linked with risk analysis. In addition to the presentation of a conceptual design model, the authors present a framework for activity driven budgeting and cost management of software development projects combined with concrete implementation examples.


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