Software Complexity and Organization of Firms’ Offshoring Activities

How does software complexity shape software providers’ offshoring tasks, and how do such firms organize their offshoring activity? These questions are important, since the global software development market is growing rapidly, offering new opportunities for software managers and entrepreneurs to distribute their activities geographically. Based on a multi-site case study of 12 software firms, we study connections between software complexity and the offshoring strategies selected. Our findings suggest that software firms select a variety of organizational structures for their offshoring activity, and that the selection is shaped by the complexity of the software in question. peerReviewed