Software outsourcing partnership model: an evaluation framework for vendor organizations

Software Outsourcing Partnership (SOP) is a new software development paradigm for developing high quality software products. A SOP is different to ordinary software development outsourcing (SDO) relationship. SOP is the enhanced form of conventional outsourcing relationship. The objective of this research paper is to develop a software outsourcing partnership model (SOPM) to identify and analyze factors that are important for vendors in conversion of their existing outsourcing relationship to partnership. We have performed a systematic literature review (SLR) process for the identification of critical success factors (CSFs) from a sample of 111 articles. Further we have categorized the identified CSFs into five partnership levels based on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Software Outsourcing Vendors’ Readiness Model (SOVRM). To validate the SLR findings and to find practices for the identified CSFs a questionnaire survey was conducted in the outsourcing industry in which 35 experts, from 8 different countries participated. Two case studies were conducted for evaluation of the SOPM. In this paper our newly developed model, SOPM, has been presented in detail. SOPM has been built with the intent to assist SDO vendor organizations in measuring their capabilities for successful conversion of their contractual outsourcing relationship to outsourcing partnership.