The role of trust in global software outsourcing relationships

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.