Abstract
Over the last decades, a trend towards the globalization of business,
and of software-intensive sectors in particular, has emerged. These
circumstances, in addition to new technical solutions, have had a
large impact on software development. Because of advantages like cost
savings, access to world-class IT professionals, and shortened
time-to-market, several companies explore these new opportunities. One
of these opportunities is Global Software Outsourcing, or GSO, meaning
software development taking place outside the national border of the
customer country.
However, GSO also brings along questions about how to successfully
operate across national and cultural boundaries. In this thesis, a
better understanding of trust is suggested as a way to deal with some
of these problems. In order to make trust identifiable in the GSO
context, seven attributes of trust are suggested. Furthermore, the
seven attributes of trust are evaluated by being applied to the
findings from a GSO project between a Norwegian customer and a Russian
software supplier. Based on this evaluation, the attributes of trust
form the basis for a suggested model to identify and describe trust in
GSO relationships.