Software Component Allocation in Distributed Development Settings

Outsourcing in software development projects has become a widely adopted utility model for dealing with competitive issues such as cost pressure and the lack of skilled human resources. Established outsourcing relationships in terms of captive offshoring centers or clientvendor partnerships are prone to fail due to the lack of qualified outsourcing decisions for the allocation of software components to either in-house or external/offshored development. Therefore, this design-oriented research endeavor aims at developing a methodology and a corresponding tool to inform and improve the outsourcing decision in global software development projects on the basis of software components. For that reason, the results of explorative case studies researching outsourcing decision making as well as concepts of collaborative software development are combined and form the proposed methodology for supporting project leads in decision making and in avoiding of instinctive and spontaneous decisions on the allocation of software components.