A cloud based model to facilitate software development uutsourcing to globally distributed locations

Outsourcing is an essential part of global software development and entails software development distributed across geographical borders. More specifically, it deals with software development teams dispersed across multiple geographical locations to carry out software development activities. By means of this business model, organizations expect to benefit from enhanced corporate value through advantages such as round the clock software development, availability of skills and labour, and a reduction in overall project costs. Outsourcing software development across multiple countries is not an easy task as organizations find it difficult to identify the best strategy because communication among the teams on software development activities remains an issue. The situation gets worse when those teams are in located in different geographical locations with different time zones. On the other hand, the advent of the cloud computing has supported organizations by bringing new concepts and opportunities resulting in benefits such as scalability, flexibility, independence, reduced cost, resource pools, and usage tracking. In this research, we aim to make use of cloud services to address the challenges associated with software outsourcing. The scope of our work is three fold: first it will identify different types of software outsourcing models in practice today. Second, it will make a comparison among them in terms of their work practices and will investigate their usefulness to fulfil organizational needs. Third, we will propose a cloud based outsourcing model to facilitate the task by improving communication among software development teams.