Build Software or Buy: A Study on Developing Large Scale Software

Software development is a set of activities which time, budget, and effort of the human resource. Over the years, the software development process has matured to enable the adaptation and integration of commercially available components. The availability of commercially-off-the-shelf and modifiable-off-the-shelf components has transferred the complexity from development and design phases to the integration phase and we can observe large- application development by integrating the available components. Often, due to the limitation of technological and other resources, developing a software application in-house may be less beneficial. In such circumstances, development firms opt to either buy software or outsource the development. In this paper, we identify the factors that govern the decision of making software applications in-house, outsourcing them, or buying them from the market. Since the concept of component integration is more common in large scale applications, in this paper we consider this case.