Employee retention and turnover in global software development

Abstract

Poor employee retention (high staff turnover) has a negative impact on software development productivity and product quality. Further, offshore outsourcing has a widely held reputation for particularly poor employee retention. Interestingly, in-house sites (regardless of location) do not suffer such high levels of staff turnover.We want to understand the factors affecting employee retention in-house and offshore outsourced settings, to better understand the potential impact of staff turnover on global software development.The research employed a mixed-method approach comprising two empirical case studies in industry involving 62 practitioners at three international companies conducting in-house and offshore outsourced software development. We collected practitioner perceptions of causal factors for employee retention and performed a cross-case analysis to triangulate our findings.Practitioners cited employment policies, work-life balance, workplace innovation, product quality, alignment of offshore work hours with onshore, long working hours and adverse impact on health as factors affecting staff retention. In-house offshore have more family friendly employment policies. In the outsourcing sector, the focus on customer satisfaction sometimes leads to less attractive work patterns.Offshore outsourcing service providers could improve development team member retention by improving work-life balance and adopting more family friendly employment policies.Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; Software development process management; Collaboration in software development;

Stress, motivation, and performance in global software engineering

“…The same researcher also indicates that some of the risks confronted by a software development project are cultural and linguistic differences, motivation, and temporal distance 77 and that these affect aspects as important as coordination, the visibility of the project, cooperation, and communication. In their work, Šmite and Wohlin 78 stated that transferring software development work to locations that are geographically, temporally, and culturally distant negatively influences performance, while Bass et al 79 analyzed the aspects that have an influence on software developers' motivation and found that things such as bad company policies, an excess of extra working hours, having to work antisocial hours and temporal distance may have a negative effect on employees' motivation. Furthermore, Amin et al (2011) focused on analyzing the aspects that cause work‐related stress in software engineering professionals and discovered that pressure to update knowledge, lack of confidence, cultural, or linguistic differences or temporal distance, among others, have a negative effect on professionals' levels of stress.…”

Análisis de los Factores que influyen en la Productividad

“…La gestión del personal, es decir, elementos como la rotación de personal (Bass et al, 2018;Dingsoyr et al, 2016) tanto interna (como se mencionó en la dimensión de equipos) como externa, normalmente es percibida como una influencia negativa y el staffing (Alahyari et al, 2018) se torna una actividad relevante.…”

A Study on Mitigating the Communication and Coordination Challenges During Requirements Change Management in Global Software Development

“…As previously discussed, communication, coordination, and control are essential components in RCM and implementation process, especially when outsourcing a software product [32]- [34]. Thus, it is of vital importance to select the most viable methods, tools, and technology to effectively implement the RCM process in GSD [26]- [28], [35], [36].…”