PORTFOLIO COST MANAGEMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF OFFSHORE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT OUTSOURCING RELATIONSHIPS FROM VENDOR’S PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Offshore Software Development Outsourcing (OSDO) is increasingly becoming the normal practice in the software industry. It offers a bundle of core benefits for client organizations which includes: high quality, fast and cost effective development of software products. However, OSDO possesses substantial risks and limitations during project management. To handle such problems Portfolio Cost Management (PCM) is used one of the best approaches. It is a set of centralized management of processes, methods and technologies used between client and vendor to reduce software costs and improve quality. We have performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) by applying customized search strings obtained from our research questions, along with the other SLR steps such as protocol development, initial publication selection, final publication selection, publication quality assessment, data extraction process and data synthesis. In this research, we explore 16 success factors of PCM to analyze the association between a client and vendor. It includes: ‘efficient cost estimation strategies’, ‘efficient project management’, ‘efficient knowledge sharing management’, ‘efficient software effort estimation’, ‘planning realistic goals’, and nine others. Furthermore, we analyze these factors based on different types of organizations, i.e. research and non-research. For best results in the software industry, it is proposed for vendor organizations to address the factors: ‘efficient cost estimation strategies’, ‘efficient project management’, ‘efficient knowledge sharing management’, ‘efficient software effort estimation’ and ‘planning realistic goals’.