Abstract

Symbiosis means the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship, or a cooperative relationship. IT-outsourcing and offshoring is momentarily far from a symbiosis. This proposal is meant to understand how sourcing can become true symbiosis between the involved parties, hence the name of our proposal.

The importance of IT-outsourcing increased significantly the past few years. The last decade this sub-industry grew 20% annually reaching 6 billion Euro in 2004. Recently, offshoring (outsourcing to low-wage-countries) is gaining importance, as well. The goal of Symbiosis is to improve the maturity of IT-outsourcing and offshoring. Alignment between business and IT must be much more clear-cut than before, so that sourcing is a successful strategy to an effective and efficient IT-function. Moreover, Symbiosis increases our understanding whether outsourcing is technically feasible, economically justifiable, and societally acceptable.

Symbiosis involves a large multi-client longitudinal study where experience with sourcing in-vivo is investigated. Symbiosis focuses on the software engineering aspects of IT-outsourcing and offshoring. Application development, its maintenance and exploitation will be studied along three important software engineering axes: software product, process and management. Symbiosis will develop predictive, qualitative and quantitative models to help turning outsourcing and offshoring into a success. Some important questions that Symbiosis will answer during the multi-client study:

Management Which factors determine the overhead of outsourcing software development/maintenance/exploitation? How can these costs be reduced? Which new metrics are needed in contracts, e.g., to measure promised productivity and quality increases, and cost, duration decreases? Is there an early-warning system to forecast potential problems with budget and time overruns, and solution underdelivery? Which software engineering aspects (unambiguous specifications, software quality, testing, coverage, etc.) are needed to minimize conflicts and litigation risks?

Process Which knowledge about software systems and their architecture has to be shared between outsourcer and the service provider so that development/maintenance/exploitation can be done properly? Think of requirements, the architecture, tests, maintenance history, and in which form they are helpful. How is the process of acceptance organized? Think of product acceptance, change requests, etc.

Product How is the source code organized and how complex is its structure? Do we have to reduce its complexity before outsourcing? Which and how do coding standards effect sourcing-success?

Outsourcing is relatively well investigated in management and information system sciences, but not in the field of software engineering. Symbiosis is a step towards sourcing research from a software engineering viewpoint. [ return ]