Now a day many software companies
develop their products at offshore locations in order to cut down on
development cost (Pilatti, Audy, 2006) as they pay lower salaries to their
employees and increase development durations by using “follow-the- sun”
workflow scheduling (Smite, Wohlin, 2011). Smite and Wohlin’s research confirms that the main
reason for companies to adopt offshore development is to reduce cost. In
countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh employment and setup cost is
cheap in comparison to USA and UK.
The other reason for switching to
offshore development as mentioned above is to increase development time by
adopting “follow the sun” workflow as it allows 24 hours development as due to
different time zones a company’s employees can do development 24hrs a day. For
example an employee in a company in USA works from 9:00a.m to 5:00 then the
employees of that company in India work 9:00 to 5:00 but due to the time
difference the total work done in a day is 19 hours. If a company divides work
in 3 time zones then its employees will be working 24hrs.
Companies also see new opportunities
with offshore development such as access to larger pool of skilled people,
shared best practices and proximity to markets and customers (Smite,
Wohlin, 2011).
Offshoring solves the
problem of cost and increases development time but as offshore development
continues to grow (Damian, Moitra, 2006) it has been observed that it causes some challenges such
as temporal, geographical and socio-cultural differences
(Holmstrom, Conchúir, Agerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2006). The study done by Carmel
and Tjia in 2005 and by Sahay, Nicholson, and Krishna in 2003 show that theses
challenge cause complications to project processes such as communication,
coordination and control (Damian, 2002).
References:
-
Carmel, Erran, and Paul Tjia. Offshoring information technology: sourcing and outsourcing to a global workforce. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Damian, Daniela. "Workshop on global software development." SIGSOFT Software. Eng. Notes 27.5 (2002).
-
Damian, Daniela, and Deependra Moitra. "Guest Editors' Introduction: Global Software Development: How Far Have We Come?." Software, IEEE 23.5 (2006): 17-19.
- Holmstrom, H., Conchúir, E. Ó., Agerfalk, J., & Fitzgerald, B. (2006, October). Global software development challenges: A case study on temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance. In Global Software Engineering, 2006. ICGSE'06. International Conference on (pp. 3-11). IEEE.
- Pilatti,
Leonardo, and Jorge Luis Nicolas Audy. "Global Software Development
Offshore Insourcing Organizations Characteristics: Lessons Learned from a Case
Study." Global Software Engineering, 2006. ICGSE'06. International
Conference on. IEEE, 2006
- Sahay, Sundeep, Brian Nicholson, and Shenai Krishna. Global IT outsourcing: software development across borders. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Smite, Darja, and Claes Wohlin. "A whisper of evidence in global software engineering." Software, IEEE 28.4 (2011): 15-18.
-Maryam Kausar
