# OffshoringDSS: An Automated Tool of Application Maintenance Offshoring
## 1 Introduction  
The rapid spread of the internet over the last two decades has prompted more and more companies to deploy their work internationally and to outsource their IT services to specialized vendors. Outsourcing is a contract that hires subcontractors to develop and maintain software. In global outsourcing, on the other hand, a company engages a distant provider. It is a contract that allows quality software to be developed across national borders. Offshoring, offshore outsourcing, and global outsourcing are terms used interchangeably. The offshoring strategy enables organizations to cut down costs, boost shareholder value, acquire a competitive advantage, reduce cycle time, increase workforce flexibility, generate revenue, and focus on their core business [1, 2]. The number of worldwide software development projects has increased due to globalization. Likewise, the number of offshore projects is likely to increase over time. Global Software Development (GSD) projects are forecast to grow by 20% to 30% in countries such as India and China. Software companies are moving to Eastern Europe and Asia because of the lower labor costs in these countries. Other benefits of using GSD include faster time to market by leveraging the time zone difference and the use of virtual teams with diverseskills. There are many other benefits of using GSD, including reduced time to market due to time zone variations and the use of virtual teams with diverse talents [3; 4; 5; 6]. IT outsourcing has subcategories such as software maintenance, software development, business process and infrastructure outsourcing. The four basic types of software maintenance are corrective, adaptive, perfective and preventive. Software maintenance is considered to be one of the most time-consuming and expensive phases in the software development lifecycle. The upgrading process of the existing program to fix bugs, adapt to new technologies and platforms, and adapt to a new environment is known as software maintenance. The cost of the software maintenance phase accounts for approximately 60% of total IT expenditures. Thus, an offshore outsourcing strategy is adopted to reduce the high cost of application maintenance. It is one of the common business techniques for developing and maintaining quality applications at a low price. Organizations save between 20% and 50% when outsourcing software development and offshoring maintenance [7; 8]. The outsourcing experts choose one of the suitable models from the available global delivery options to deliver services in the global software paradigm. However, adopting the appropriate model is a complicated decision-making process, because the selection of the right model is based on various influencing factors, type of project and client requirements. Additionally, the process of offshore outsourcing requires knowledge and experience in the same domain. The existing literature indicates that a minimum number of studies have concentrated on offshore outsourcing decisions. Particularly scarce research studies addressing the decision-making process of the offshoring decision of application maintenance can be found in the literature, such as [9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19]. However, we have not observed any research study that presented an automated and novel tool to make the offshoring decisions of application maintenance. Currently, IT professionals use their experience as well as frameworks, conceptual models or multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models to assess the projects and choose one of the available sourcing alternatives. Hence, the current study presents Offshoring Decision Support System (OffshoringDSS), an automated and novel tool to make the offshoring decisions of application maintenance. The suggested tool is able to make the sourcing decision based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique that automatically performs all the calculations according to the input provided and ranks the sourcing models.