Critical challenges in offshore software development outsourcing: An empirical study

Offshore software development outsourcing is a contractual business of high quality software production at offshore destination(s) with significant cost-saving. The objective of this research paper is to identify challenges in offshore software development outsourcing. We have performed questionnaire surveys with 53 experts from a total of 20 different countries. We asked the participants to rank each challenge on a five-point scale to determine the perceived importance of each challenge. Our survey included challenges identified in the previous findings of our systematic literature review. Our study reveals both 'lack of technical capability' and 'poor quality of service and system/process' as the critical challenges in offshore software development outsourcing. Our results also indicate that 'hidden costs', 'communication gap', 'poor infrastructure' and 'lack of control over project' are critical in the opinions of different groups of practitioners.