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Vendors and clients collaborate on outsourcing projects through virtual teams. Trust is an important indicator of mutual relationships that lead to successful projects. This study’s objective is to investigate the determinants of trust in different stages of collaboration during offshore software-development outsourcing. Using a case study approach to collect data, we find that reputation, a cognition-based trust factor, influences clients’ trust in vendors in the team-forming stage. Responsible team climate, a knowledge-based trust factor, impacts clients’ trust in vendors in the team-storming and norming stages of software design and development. Structural assurance, an institutional trust factor, encourages vendors’ trust in clients in the same team-storming and norming stages of software design and development. Benefit, a calculative-based trust factor, influences vendors’ trust in clients in the team-performing stage of software delivery and implementation. Our research findings have implications for software-outsourcing collaboration theories and practices and may have implications beyond that sphere, including team building in multiple contexts and environments.

This paper presents the development of Software Outsourcing Partnership Model.We have executed research methodologies like SLR, Empirical study and Case study.We have adopted various models such as CMMI, IMM and SOVRM for this model.We have identified a total of 14 CSFs and 142 practices for their implementation.The SOPM was validated through the conduction of two case studies in the industry. Software Outsourcing Partnership (SOP) is a new software development paradigm for developing high quality software products. A SOP is different to ordinary software development outsourcing (SDO) relationship. SOP is the enhanced form of conventional outsourcing relationship. The objective of this research paper is to develop a software outsourcing partnership model (SOPM) to identify and analyze factors that are important for vendors in conversion of their existing outsourcing relationship to partnership. We have performed a systematic literature review (SLR) process for the identification of critical success factors (CSFs) from a sample of 111 articles. Further we have categorized the identified CSFs into five partnership levels based on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Software Outsourcing Vendors' Readiness Model (SOVRM). To validate the SLR findings and to find practices for the identified CSFs a questionnaire survey was conducted in the outsourcing industry in which 35 experts, from 8 different countries participated. Two case studies were conducted for evaluation of the SOPM. In this paper our newly developed model, SOPM, has been presented in detail. SOPM has been built with the intent to assist SDO vendor organizations in measuring their capabilities for successful conversion of their contractual outsourcing relationship to outsourcing partnership. Display Omitted

This paper examines the role of software piracy in digital platforms where a platform provider makes a decision of how much software to produce in-house and how much to outsource from a third-party software provider. Using a vertical differentiation model, we theoretically investigate how piracy influences the software outsourcing decision. We find that when piracy is intermediate, the loss in in-house software profits due to piracy outweighs the loss in licensing fee profits. As a result, an increase in piracy leads to more outsourcing. However, when piracy is high, it becomes too expensive for the platform provider to subsidize the software provider, resulting in a decrease in outsourcing. Moreover, when software variety is also endogenously chosen by firms, the platform provider’s incentive to develop software variety in-house depends not only on the return from software profits but also on the return from hardware profits. Under such a situation, an increase in piracy always leads to less outsourcing and less total software variety. To provide additional insights on the outsourcing decision, we conduct empirical analyses using data from the U.S. handheld video game market between 2004 and 2012. This market is a classical two-sided market, dominated by two handheld platforms (Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable) and is known to have suffered from software piracy significantly. Our regression results show that in this market, piracy increases outsourcing but has no effect on the total software variety.

Although Japan represents the single largest Asian market and 10% of the global software outsourcing market, little is understood about how Japanese companies make software project outsourcing decisions. Tried-and-tested outsourcing models consistently fail to predict the outsourcing decisions of Japanese companies, leaving global software development companies with little usable guidance in the Japanese outsourcing market. Analyses of 396 software project outsourcing decisions made by 33 IT managers in Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM-Japan, and Mitsubishi provides novel insights into the drivers of Japanese software outsourcing decisions. The objective of this paper is to develop an analytic tool to predict the likelihood of a software project being outsourced by Japanese IT managers.

Our research objective is to understand software outsourcing practitioners' perceptions of the role of trust in managing client-vendor relationships and the factors that are critical to trust in off-shore software outsourcing relationships. Participants were 12 Vietnamese software development practitioners developing software for Far Eastern, European, and American clients. They identified that cultural understanding, creditability, capabilities, and personal visits are important factors in gaining the initial trust of a client, while cultural understanding, communication strategies, contract conformance, and timely delivery are vital factors in maintaining that trust. We contrast Vietnamese and Indian practitioners' views on factors affecting trust relationships.

As more US companies outsource their software projects overseas, they find that it is more challenging to control software development risk in countries with dissimilar IT capabilities. Using data collected from software projects developed in Korea, we investigate the impacts of specific risk management strategies and residual performance risk on objective performance measures such as cost and schedule overrun. Our results indicate that, unlike subjective performance measures, our objective cost and schedule overrun performance measures are positively associated with residual performance risk in Korea. We also investigate the impact of two alternative conceptualization of software development risk on both objective performance and subjective performance. Finally, we discuss relevant policy implications for software development and outsourcing.