Identification and Prioritization of Critical Success Factors to Enhance Quality of Software in an Outsourced Environment from a Vendor Perspective

Abstract

The Quality of a product makes it acceptable, usable, and beneficial for its users. Like any other engineering product, quality plays a vital role in the software industry, where software product’s acceptability, usability, productivity, and reliability are heavily dependent on software quality. Often too many factors can badly influence the quality of software if not dealt with care during the development stages. However, developing a quality product in an outsourced environment is particularly a challenging job due to the supervision of dispersed team members, lack of communication, responsibility, interest, lack of management, government policies, language barriers, and many others. In this research, a model will be suggested based on success factors (SF) that will minimize the issues and improve the software quality by providing guidelines to Vendor Organizations (VO) in an outsourcing environment. These factors will be identified through a systematic literature review and previously conducted empirical studies. We will assign weight to each identified factor based on experts’ feedback and empirical studies and thus quantify our findings to get a clearer idea about a particular factor influencing software quality in an outsourced environment. The proposed model's validity will be checked with the help of a case study and an expert’s opinion.