Outsourcing Decisions of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: A Multiple-Case Study Approach in the German Software Industry

Outsourcing of software development tasks has become a major issue for large software enterprises over the last decades. Nowadays, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) follow this trend and outsource parts of their software development as well. However, most of the existing literature deals with large enterprises whereas the situation of SMEs is being neglected. Especially sourcing decisions and the organizational as well as operational setup may differ between large enterprises and SMEs. We choose an exploratory multiple-case study approach focusing on the German software market in order to shed light on these aspects of the sourcing behavior of SMEs. This paper addresses three complementing research questions. Besides the question of which phases of the software development process qualify for outsourcing, we explore the organizational setup of SMEs' outsourcing scenarios. In addition, we seek to find out which characteristics a software component has to fulfill in order to qualify for outsourcing.