Procedural coordination and offshored software tasks: Lessons from two case studies
Information and Management
Understanding the Impact of Collaboration Software on Product Design and Development
Information Systems Research
Optimal Software Development: A Control Theoretic Approach
Information Systems Research
Software Effort, Quality, and Cycle Time: A Study of CMM Level 5 Projects
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Globally distributed software development project performance: an empirical analysis
Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
Topographically discounted Internet infrastructure resources: a panel study and econometric analysis
Information Technology and Management
Information and Software Technology
The impact of process choice in high maturity environments: An empirical analysis
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
International Journal of Business Information Systems
Balancing IT with the Human Touch: Optimal Investment in IT-Based Customer Service
Information Systems Research
Information system development approach: facts from IT SMEs in India
International Journal of Business Information Systems
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Software Firm Cost Structure and Its Impact on IPOs in the E-Commerce Era
International Journal of E-Business Research
Software Quality Initiatives: An Empirical Study of Indian SMEs in the IT Sector
International Journal of Technology Diffusion
Information Resources Management Journal
Organizing knowledge workforce for specified iterative software development tasks
Decision Support Systems
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This study draws upon theories of task interdependence and organizational inertia to analyze the effect of quality improvement on infrastructure activity costs in software development. Although increasing evidence indicates that quality improvement reduces software development costs, the impact on infrastructure activities is not known. Infrastructure activities include services like computer operations, data integration, and configuration management that support software development. Because infrastructure costs represent a substantial portion of firms' information technology budgets, it is important to identify innovations that yield significant cost savings in infrastructure activities. We evaluate quality and cost data collected in nine infrastructure activity centers over 10 years of product development in a major software firm undergoing a quality transformation. Findings indicate that infrastructure activities do benefit from quality improvement. The greatest marginal cost savings are realized in infrastructure activities that are highly interdependent with development and that occur later in the software development life cycle. Organizational inertia influences the rapidity with which the infrastructure activities benefit from higher product quality, especially for the more specialized activities. Finally, our findings suggest that although the savings in infrastructure from quality improvement are substantial, there are diminishing returns to quality improvement in infrastructure activities.