Outsourcing in international software development company argumentative essay examples

Introduction

Software development is not an easy task and requires experts of the field and for it to be successful. Experts have to follow steps of software development in order to develop stable software in addition to maintaining it after development to ensure its continuity of performing services reliably. Outsourcing of software is contracting out the development of software, its management, maintenance and operation to vendors who have experts with all requires skills and vendors with excellent products or applications. This essay will argue on outsourcing in International Software Development Company, develop a project plan, and discuss phases in SDLC.
Many firms software and non-software producing firms are outsourcing their software due to several reasons despite software outsourcing failure to deliver the expected results over fifty percent of the time but outsourcing it continues to be trendy and widely used. . According to outsourcing is done by firms in order to save costs in staffing; this is because software development requires experts who are expensive to pay especially if a company’s core activity is not software development. Another reason for outsourcing is that, it enables a company to focus on its core activities instead of spending more on software development, development time is also reduced since companies outsource to big and well known software companies who have experts and spend less time developing. In addition, it improves quality as well as management of developed software since are developed by experienced personnel.
Despite outsourcing benefits, it has some limitations too. A company that is contracting is not sure of its information confidentiality and lack of control of all outsourced products. A company should then, have clear decisions when outsourcing especially during maintenance and implementation phases of development.

Project plan

Success of software depends on the choice of model that is being used. In incremental development methodology cycles are divided up into smaller easily manageable iterations that are used in whole waterfall model stages. The cycles include project selection, feasibility study, requirement analysis, software design, implementation, testing, and maintenance.

A figure below shows a Gantt chart for incremental development cycles.

FIG 1: Incremental methodology
Project selection is the stage that is done by management of the firm that requires the software. In feasibility study stage, developers check how much they can put to the software to be developed, checking out any existing software. The third stage is requirement analysis where data is gathered from users using several techniques such as interviews, questionnaires, documentation of existing software, brain storming, among others. System analysis and design is the fourth stage that involves where the entire software is defined and physical system designed using logical designs such as DFDs. Coding is the next stage where programmers code using several programming languages. When the software is ready, it is sent to the testing room where quality analysts test it thoroughly for any errors by developing test cases. Implementation and maintenance is the last stage where software is run on various systems by end users and if it runs well without flaws, it is considered ready to be launched by installing it to needed systems and training the end users. Maintenance is carried out regularly and reverse engineering if it becomes obsolete and more requirements are demanded.

Work Cited

Selleo. A Practical Guide to Outsourcing your Software Development. Guide. Poland: ul. Kaminskiego 19, 2005. Document. .