Open Access

ARTICLE

Offshore Software Maintenance Outsourcing Process Model Validation: A Case Study Approach

Atif Ikram^1,2,*, Masita Abdul Jalil¹, Amir Bin Ngah¹, Adel Sulaiman³, Muhammad Akram³, Ahmad Salman Khan⁴

1 Faculty of Ocean Engineering Technology and Informatics, University Malaysia Terengganu, Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia
2 Department of Computer Science & Information Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, The University of Lahore, Lahore, 54000, Pakistan
3 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran, Saudi Arabia
4 Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology, The University of Lahore, Lahore, 54000, Pakistan

* Corresponding Author: Atif Ikram. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2023, 74(3), 5035-5048. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2023.034692

Received 24 July 2022; Accepted 30 September 2022; Issue published 28 December 2022

Abstract

The successful execution and management of Offshore Software Maintenance Outsourcing (OSMO) can be very beneficial for OSMO vendors and the OSMO client. Although a lot of research on software outsourcing is going on, most of the existing literature on offshore outsourcing deals with the outsourcing of software development only. Several frameworks have been developed focusing on guiding software system managers concerning offshore software outsourcing. However, none of these studies delivered comprehensive guidelines for managing the whole process of OSMO. There is a considerable lack of research working on managing OSMO from a vendor’s perspective. Therefore, to find the best practices for managing an OSMO process, it is necessary to further investigate such complex and multifaceted phenomena from the vendor’s perspective. This study validated the preliminary OSMO process model via a case study research approach. The results showed that the OSMO process model is applicable in an industrial setting with few changes. The industrial data collected during the case study enabled this paper to extend the preliminary OSMO process model. The refined version of the OSMO process model has four major phases including (i) Project Assessment, (ii) SLA (iii) Execution, and (iv) Risk.

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Keywords

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