Software Outsourcing, Then The Contractor Performance Influencing Factors

Software outsourcing has been developing rapidly since 1990s. India achieved great success in this area. China's economy grew very fast since it opened the door thirty years ago. China gained leading positions in terms of the volume and output in manufacture, service, export, industry and agriculture. However, software outsourcing falls behind India as well as some other leading countries and regions. China and India are the two largest developing countries, there are a lot of similarities in software development and education. The backward in software outsourcing in China catches the attention of the scholars worldwide.The major research approach of this paper is multi-methodologies. Case study is used to analyze the cases of the software outsourcing companied in China and India. Empirical method is also adopted. In multi-case research, the software outsourcing companies in China and India are categorized based on the level of outsourcing as well as the coverage in international market. Three companies are chosen from each of the three classes of software outsourcing companies in China and India. The research is conducted through articles, company documents, author's observation and interview. After the two groups of difference comparison of the software companies in China and India, three main finds are concluded. The first, software outsourcing is economics of scale, the company with large scale has more opportunities to undertake the medium-large projects than smaller scale companies. Their performance is also higher than that of the smaller companies; Second, In software outsourcing, especially in international software outsourcing, whether the outsourcing company and insourcing company, or insourcing company and the final customer of the software can use the same language to communicate will impact on the ability of the insourcing company to undertake the order and performance; The third, the technical ability and experience of the software insourcing company, including the management process and document management will impact on the ability to undertake the order and performance of the company. After the multi-case research, the empirical method is used to analyze the main factors that impact the outsourcing success and performance. The multiple methodologies strengthen the robustness of the research in the thesis. Based on the research results, the author compares the development of the software outsourcing in China and India, analyzes their similarities and differences, then make suggestions to the development of China's software outsourcing. First, to use economics of scale to support and develop large size software outsourcing companies; Second, pay more attention to the communication of different languages and cultures to upgrade the competition ability in international software outsourcing market; Third, enhance the technical capacity and the working experience of engineers of the software outsourcing companies; Forth, explore international market to get more market share of international software outsourcing; Fifth, expand software outsourcing based on the demand of the outsourcing companies. Finally, the author states the limitation of the research and the direction of the future research.