Passed PhD First Year Exam

I know I have been away from the blog for sometime but now I am back. Good news is that I have passed my first year of PhD bad news is that their is still a long road ahead before I complete my PhD.

Currently I have been working on the ethical agreement that I need before I can actually start interviewing companies and collect data for my research.

I am waiting for the University's approval and in the mean time I am working on a document that will explain why I will be asking a specific question in my interviews and how will it help my research.

Hopefully by my next post I will have completed that document and share with you the details of it once I have handed it over to my supervisor.

Next Stages of My PhD

The next stages of my research will be as follows:

1. Arrange initial meetings with a group of software companies to identify, which companies fall under my research criteria.
2. Formal meeting dates will be set with the team. 
3. Semi-Structured interviews will be conducted in order to gather data. 
4. On the data collected qualitative research analysis will be applied in order to analyse the findings from the interview. 
5. Based on the findings I will work on developing a new methodology, which will contribute in solving issues of offshore software development. 
6. In order to verify and validated my methodology I will hold reflective workshops and apply replication logic

Agile Methods and offshoring

Many companies use different agile methodologies for different purposes. The table below shows the use of different methodologies:

References:

•  Berczuk, S., Back to basics: The role of agile principles in success with an distributed scrum team. Proceedings of AGILE, 2007, pp. 382-388 

•  Holmstrom, H., Conchúir, E. Ó., Agerfalk, J., & Fitzgerald, B. (2006). Global software development challenges: A case study on temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance. In Global Software Engineering, 2006. ICGSE'06. International Conference), 3-11.

• Jensen, B. and Zilmer, A. Cross-continent development using Scrum and XP. Proceedings of XP. Springer Berlin, 2003, pp. 146-153

•  Kircher, M., Jain, P., Corsaro, A. and Levine, D. Distributed Extreme Programming. Proceedings of the International Con- ference on eXtreme Programmingand Flexible Processes in  Software Engineering, Sardinia, Italy, May 20 - 23,2001.

•  Smits, H. and Pshigoda, G. Implementing scrum in a distributed software development organization. Proceedings of AGILE 2007, pp. 371-375.

Factors that Encourage Offshoring

In my previous posts I have mentioned factors that effect offshore software development. But in this post I will highlight the factors that motivate companies to go for offshoring

1. Economic Factors: lower salaries, interest rate, development of capital markets, capital costs and emergence of technology centers.
2. Political - Legal conditions: labour, taxation and competition laws.
3. Socio-demographic Factors: population size, age structure, education levels and workforce motivation.
4. Technological Factors: development in technology and transportation.

Research Methodology for my thesis

I have been working on designing a research methodology for my PhD thesis. As developing a new software development methodology isn't as straightforward as developing a software itself. The issue with developing a new methodology is how will we validate and evaluate it.

The approach that I will be using it to hold reflective workshops[1] and based on the findings I shall validate my methodology for offshore software development.

Reference:

[1] Reflection workshops. [Available: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Reflection+workshop]

Impact of offshore on the UK Software Companies

In Europe, UK companies are more inclined to make use of off-shoring, as they have to face international competition. Many UK organisations have software developed from other countries such as Microsoft applications in the USA, SAP software in Germany and so on. In a research done by Forrester predicted that by 2009, UK will account for more than 75% of £2.38 billion of Western European spending on off-shoring and that IT services provided from overseas will grow from £726 million in 2004 and will keep increasing 27% each year.

India’s most successful outsourcing consultant, Wipro gets 12% of its work from UK companies (The Economist, 04-03-2004) and in 2012 it has achieved the award Project of the year 

Many European countries want to offshore their work because of:

• Low wages in developing countries.
• flexible labour laws in the UK.
• English speaking cheap labour available.