Barriers of managing cloud outsource software development projects: a multivocal study

Management of COSD projects is a challenging task due to number of distant development locations in different time zones, client and vendor organizations, different cloud deployment models and range of different service level agreements. The objective of this study is to identify the barriers associated with managing COSD projects. We implemented a Multivocal Literature Review to identify barriers that influence management of COSD projects. We identified 21 COSD management barriers from 165 primary studies. The comparison between the barriers identified from formal and grey literature indicate that there are similarities between the barriers investigated from both types of literature. Moreover, client-vendor analysis shows that there is no significant difference between COSD management barriers associated with both types of organizations. We believe that the study findings will assist both research and industry community to better understand and manage COSD projects.