Strengthening Software Make vs. Buy Decision: A Mixed-Method Approach

Abstract

Over the past few decades, multiple software development process models, tools, and techniques have been used by practitioners. Despite using these techniques, most software development organizations still fail to meet customer's needs within time and budget. Time overrun is one of the major reasons for project failure. There is a need to come up with a comprehensive solution that would increase the chances of project success. However, the "make vs. buy" decision can be helpful for "in time" software development. Social media have become a popular platform for discussion of all sorts of topics, so software development is no exception. Software developers discuss all the pros and cons of making vs. buy decisions on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter trending is a typical feature that evaluates the level of popularity of a specific event on online networking. A mixed-method approach comprising of interviews of software industry experts and Twitter data extraction is applied to scrutinize the effective decision of software build vs. buy decision. The findings of the analysis show that software makes vs. buy decisions depend on several factors including cost, development technology, software development team skills, and time. Based on the finding of the study a framework is proposed for the decision to build versus buy in Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, the framework has been designed to statistically indicate make versus buy decisions of the organization and to suggest appropriate choices based on different parameters.