Context

This use case applies in contexts where software systems are IT applications that you provide to the business-side of your company. That is, the business departments of your company are your customers who want their requirements to be built into the software systems that you are responsible for.

Your software developer workforce is split with respect to hour-rate costs per developer. It could be that one part of your developer workforce consists of in-house developers and another part is provided by a (cheaper) 3rd-party provider. Or you have different geographic locations, e.g., Germany, USA, India, China, where developer salaries differ significantly.

Pains

You know which software system is developed/maintained by which team (low-cost versus best-cost), however, you do not know if this is a cost-effective allocation.

You would like to free the best-cost teams from as much burden as possible and shift work to low-cost teams, however, you don’t know which software systems are suitable for being “far-sourced” without creating risks.

Gains

You would want a data-driven way to assess each software factory (and its system) with respect to the suitability to hand them over to low-cost teams.

You would want to see and compare KPIs per software system such as:

• Maintainability / Comprehensibility: Is the system highly complex and would it be a nightmare for average skilled developers?
• Code Stability / Volatility: Is the system’s code frequently changed? This implicitly means that you should not hand it to teams who are far away from the requirement-giving business departments.
• Know-How Lock-In:
  • Which software systems bind best-cost developers because they and only they have worked in the code?
  • Which systems have already experienced team fluctuations - and are therefore more suitable for a hand-over because they have already gone through the painful measures to counteract knowledge monopolies?

Having a data-driven way would prove that you know how to proactively encounter your cost and risk challenges. You would have real-time answers with which you steer and could also report.

You would turn your management style upside down: from reactive fire-fighting to proactive actions. You would be able to identify risks before your customers, the business departments, start complaining about too costly or too slow IT delivery.