A Comparative Analysis of In-House and Offshore Software Development by Using Agile Methodologies at the Design/Code Phase of Software Development: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Offshoring software projects have been common for a few decades and were once thought to be the savior of software development project issues that plagued in-house software developers. Even with many recent advances in software development and communication, many projects are still compromised in some way. This dissertation analyzes in-house and offshore projects that were conducted using the waterfall methodology to determine the real source of the issues. The main hypothesis here is that by implementing agile, at least in part, at the design/code phase of software development will not only reduce or eliminate issues that were identified using waterfall but prove that development problems are independent of whether a project is developed offshore or in-house. This study also shows that, in addition to agile mitigating project issues at one phase of software development, project stakeholders are more comfortable, if they are in the process of migrating to agile development, by implementing agile initially at only one phase of the process.