An exploration of FMCDM approach for evaluating the outcome/success of GSD projects

This study presents a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (FMCDM) approach for analyzing the influential factors affecting the outcome/success of global software development (GSD) projects. The main aim of this study is to demonstrate the potential of proposed methodology based on FMCDM which is used to measure the offshore/onsite teams’ partnership quality dimensions and underlying the influential factors towards the outcome of GSD projects. The uncertainty and subjective vagueness within the decision making process are dealing with fuzzy linguistic terms quantified in an interval scale [0,1]. The proposed FMDCM framework is used to determine the priority weights of partnership quality factors and rating the GSD project outcome/success from the service provider perspective into three dimensions: service quality, schedule and cost improvement. The predicted GSD project outcome values are obtained to facilitate organization and to determine the impact of offshore/on-site teams’ partnership quality towards success of GSD project outcome otherwise initiate actions to improve the GSD project outcome. This study established survey research method that involves thirty-eight critical influential factors evaluated by twenty software professionals for their assessment of GSD projects outcome in India.