Implications of Onshore Development on Global Software Engineering

Recently software industry has paid significant attention to customizing software products across distributed boundaries. Communicating the requirements of multiple clients across distributed borders is a crucial challenge for the software customization process. Local decision-making and local development at the client site are considered methods for reducing difficulties in communicating the requirements of multiple clients across distributed boundaries. This paper introduces a new model called the onshore development model (ODM) for accomplishing the customization requests in the distributed development process of software. This model presents a scenario for enhancing the onsite development of specific requirements to reduce delays and misunderstandings between the clients and the team involved. This model depends on moving the development process to the client’s location. Three empirical studies were conducted to evaluate the proposed model to measure its productivity, time performance, and cost reduction. The proposed model has been compared with two other models: the basic model (BM), which allocates the decision-making process and the development process for teams at the vendor’s location, and the local decision-making model (LDec), which assigns the decision-making process for team at the client’s location. The results of the empirical studies showed significant outperforming of the proposed model over the basic model and local decision-making model in productivity, time performance, and cost reduction. The productivity of the proposed model improved by 39% and 10% more than the basic model and the local decision-making model, respectively. In addition, the time performance of the proposed model became faster by 49% and 20.8% than the basic model and the local decision-making model, respectively. Also, it reduced the total cost of the development process by 31% in terms of the salaries of all persons involved in requirements collecting, decision-making, and development.