An empirical study investigation of task allocation process barriers in the context of offshore software development outsourcing: an organization size based analysis

Abstract

Planning and managing the task allocation process in offshore software development outsourcing environment plays an important role in order to develop the good quality software with in time and budget. In this study we investigate the berries that negatively affect the task allocation process in geographically distributed development environment. A literature review and questionnaire survey approach was adopted in order to investigate the barriers of task allocation process. The investigated barriers were further classified into four core categories i.e. team, coordination, project administration and technology. A total of 14 barriers were identified from the literature and validated with organizational experts by using questionnaire survey. The findings revolved that all the survey respondents are agree with the findings of literature review. We further analyze the investigated barriers based on organizations size, to check the significant difference between the barriers with respect to organization size (small, medium and large). Moreover the categorization of the investigated barriers indicate that the project administration is the most significant category of investigated barriers of task allocation process. The findings of this study may helpful for researcher and practitioners to consider the most significant barriers of task allocation process in the context of offshore software development outsourcing environment.