Effect of Quality Management Practices in Distributed Offshore Software Development
Narayan Ramasubbu, Sunil Mithas, Chris F. Kemerer · 2004
While IT vendors have made significant improvements in the process maturity of software development, growth of information technology outsourcing and distributed software development have posed new challenges in managing software projects. In this paper we develop and test empirical models of productivity and conformance quality in the context of distributed software development. By analyzing data collected on more than forty large globally distributed commercial projects from a leading software vendor operating at the highest software development process maturity level (CMM-5), we find that, while prevention and appraisal-based quality approaches are effective in improving distributed development productivity, failure-based quality approaches are effective in improving quality. These results indicate that investments in quality management practices have varying effects on project performance parameters. Our results suggest that the choice of appropriate quality management approach should be guided by the development context and project goals.