Offshoring is not as popular as it seems. According to a recent German survey, only 1.5% of all outsourcing activities target offshore locations. This is a remarkably small figure taking into account the widely published purported benefits of offshoring. In this paper we demonstrate that communication problems are at the core of offshoring woes. This does not come as a surprise as they also play a major role in onshore projects. Based on our experience in tackling these challenges with our well established communication-centered agile design and development approach, we present case-study-reinforced advice for successful offshore projects. We show that a common view of the underlying architecture is of paramount importance for these projects.
MotivationOffshoring is a dominant trend in software development with annual growth rates of about 33% in markets such as India [1]. It promises benefits in the areas of costs, flexibility, and concentration on core competencies. Empirical studies have shown, however, that offshoring also entails a considerable number of challenges. These are language and cultural barriers, skill mismatches, and quality discrepancies.Against this backdrop it is not surprising that only 1.5% of all outsourcing activities target offshore locations, according to a recent German survey [2].We assume that offshore development projects can benefit substantially from the integration of architecturecentric development by compensating for their common shortfalls. In this paper we will present a case study with onshore and offshore teams that we conducted to substantiate our approach.In the following section of this paper we will demonstrate that communication is a core challenge in offshoring. We will continue by examining how communication problems can be solved by means of architecture. Then we present findings from our case study. Finally, we will sum up the essence in the concluding section.
Offshoring benefits and offshoring challengesClearly, the dominant expectation of corporations that outsource (parts of) their IT is cost saving [3]. While there are other factors such as increased flexibility, none of these factors comes close to the 90% mark that is reached by cost benefits.While past studies used to focus on benefits, recent studies have also examined challenges that offshoring entails. These include unexpectedly high costs for infrastructure, communications, travel and cultural training; lower productivity due to high staff turnover at the offshore site and low morale at the onshore site; management problems due to cultural differences and a poor spread of information; problems when communicating with customers; and technical mismatches of all sorts [4,5,6].When faced with these problems in an unsorted and condensed form as above, they appear to be very hard to tackle. It helps, however, to examine how these problems interrelate. This leads to a distinction between problems on different levels where the problems at the higher levels are direct consequences of problems at the lower levels....
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