CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices

Introduction

Outsourcing software development has gathered pace in recent years with Gartner and Forrester Research predicting this trend to continue to rise(Reich 2003). Most of the software is being outsourced from the United States and Europe for development in India, China, and eastern European nations where labor rates are low. The distributed nature of such development, however, exacerbates the problem of clearly and unambiguously communicating information between collaborating teams, making it difficult to coordinate tasks and enforce common goals, policies, standards, and quality levels(Carmel & Agarwal 2001). It is therefore no surprise that many outsourced projects fail to deliver quality products within budget on time(Kharif 2003