## 4 Results and Discussion
### Influencing Factors, Critical Success Factors and the Proposed Sourcing Framework
Poor communication can result in a breakdown of coordination, delays, stakeholder tensions, project visibility issues and requirement elicitation issues. Communication between the members of distributed teams is hindered by the main challenges of global sourcing, such as cultural diversity, language barrier and time zone differences. Many questions are not answered due to a lack of coordination or inadequate communication, and programmers on other platforms make incorrect assumptions. In some cases, changes are not reported to other departments in a timely way, which causes difficulties in providing services in the global delivery. Therefore, in GSD, inadequate coordination and communication leads to a high amount of vulnerabilities and inefficiency [3; 61; 62; 63]. As a consequence, poor communication (Yes) shows the suitability of the onshore model. The vendor's transaction and development costs go up when local workers are involved. Therefore, organizations in high-cost countries, such as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia outsource application maintenance, while companies in low-cost countries, such as China, Ireland, India and Russia, deliver services. Offshoring strategy is used by businesses to save the cost of application maintenance around 20% to  
Figure 4: Sourcing framework of application maintenance offshoring. 50%. Thus, software maintenance at low cost (Yes) motivates both the client and vendor for offshore outsourcing decisions [2; 3; 4; 64; 65; 66; 67]. The sub factors of legal requirements are the protection of intellectual property, confidentiality, data protection, restrictions of imports/exports, currency exchange, labor laws, data transfer restrictions, taxes and government approval regarding offshoring. Since no international rules exist that adequately cover an individual's work abroad, IP rights protection is a challenge to global sourcing. Some countries, such as the United States and Europe, have labor and work policies that hinder the outsourcing process for both the consumer and the provider [3; 68; 69]. Therefore, the onshore model is preferred in case legal requirements exist (Yes). However, services may be delivered using an offshore model if the legalities of a project are resolved or if the project does not have strict legal criteria (No). Data networking, internet connectivity, network, data centers and servers are the sub factors of infrastructure. Appropriate infrastructure (Yes) motivates the global sourcing decisions. On the other hand, a lack of stable infrastructure (No) would have a negative impact on global delivery and suit the onshore model [2; 68; 69]. Prior global expertise, customer and provider experience and process maturity are the sub factors that make up the factor \"maturity level\". If the provider or client lacks the necessary skills (No), such as global expertise and previous experience, the outsourced project may fail. Hence, for this type of project, the nearshore model is chosen. The maturity of the customer and vendor (Yes), on the other hand, favors the offshore model [2; 70; 71]. \"Frequent requirement changes\" includes volatile requirements, the instability of requirements, unclear requirements and changes in the application portfolio. Certain projects fail due to ambiguous and unspecified requirements (Yes) along with other global constraints. Requirement uncertainty means a company does not have a clear idea of what it needs from a specific business process. In these situations, the onshore model is preferable over the offshore model. While using the offshore model, changes in requirements can be managed by hiring onsite employees [1; 39; 72; 73; 74]. While dealing with offshore team members with heavy accents, such as Indians, Russians and Chinese, the language challenge is compounded when using landlines. To provide help desk services on a remote site, provider employees should be native speakers or they should be able to speak the client's language fluently to avoid communication gaps.