Practitioner's view of barriers to software outsourcing partnership formation: An empirical exploration

Abstract

Software Outsourcing Partnership (SOP) is considered as a kind of risk and reward sharing client‐vendor relationship. Generally, a fruitful outsourcing association might be converted to an outsourcing partnership. The objective of this research is to identify and analyse barriers that are hurdles to vendors in renewing or promoting their ongoing client‐vendor relationship to outsourcing partnership. A questionnaire survey based on the findings of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was performed with 50 experts. The study identifies five critical barriers such as “insufficient quality of technical capability,” “poor infrastructure,” “poor quality of service,” “communication gap and poor coordination,” and “relational risk.” The results indicate that barriers' insufficient quality of technical capability, poor infrastructure, and poor quality of service were common in four types of experts while insufficient quality of technical capability is common in three levels of experts. Furthermore, barriers were classified based on their criticality from client‐vendor perspective. The results of Spearman correlation test (rs = 0.714 and ρ = 0.000) confirmed that the participant strongly agrees with the outcomes of the SLR. The results suggest that for successful renewal or promotion of their existing outsourcing association, vendor organizations should address all the identified barriers in general and the most common barriers in particular.

A framework for modelling structural association amongst barriers to software outsourcing partnership formation: An interpretive structural modelling approach

“…This situation might create difficulties when contributors' judgments may be inaccurate or when outsourcing barrier supposed to have a significant inter‐relation for renewal or upgradation may not, in fact, be significant at all. However, similar to others opinion‐based empirical research studies, we have full confidence that the findings of this research are based on the data that have been collected from the relevant participants who have been involved and have vastly diversified experience in SDO.…”

“…The same criterion was also incorporated in our previous studies . A study was conducted by Niazi et al, in which they have enlisted key factors in software process improvement (SPI) with the criterion ≥50%.…”

“…Construct validity is concerned with measurement scale whether the measurement scales represent the attributes being measured. The attributes of this research study were taken from a considerable amount of previous research and experiencing a SLR . The respondents of the survey confirm the relevance of the attributes selected.…”

De‐motivators for the adoption of agile methodologies for large‐scale software development teams: An SLR from management perspective

“…However, it is not a systematic omission, as reported in the literature. 42,[56][57][58] Nevertheless, we believe that our presented findings (de-motivators) are based on the extraction from the most relevant published literature. Finally, in the SLR exclusion criteria, papers written in a non-English language and abstract-only papers were excluded.…”

Critical Barriers in Software Outsourcing Vendor Organizations and Their Impacts on Software Outsourcing Clients: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Emphasis has been placed on improving the overall performance of organization with the decision-makers implementing strategies that can improve organizational capabilities, efficiency and productivity (Colomo-Palacios et al, 2014). Strategic software outsourcing has been the key strategy in software development process that should be explored (Khan and Khan, 2017;Ali et al, 2020a). With the focus of most organizations being on software outsourcing, industries have restructured in reducing cost of production and researchers have increased their attention on the decision-making process on software outsourcing.…”