Cloud Outsourcing requires a proper handover process (position paper)

Cloud Outsourcing has shown to be a successful form of delegating tasks to individual programmers over the Internet in the context of small businesses. As a result, bigger companies are now strongly considering to practice it. Going over to Cloud Outsourcing, however, can be a very challenging task. It does no longer imply delegating some simple tasks to some outsourcees and acquiring their results. It implies a handover of complex system parts to be worked upon and a handover of knowledge and experience required for performing the tasks on the system parts. In this paper, we claim that the software community must define a proper handover process before embarking on Cloud Outsourcing. If we do not have such a process in place, we are likely to fail when delegating complex responsibilities to unknown parties over the Internet. In this paper, we also identify research questions that need to be answered before going over the Cloud Outsourcing mode.