The authors of this paper found that the terms used in the outsourcing strategy literature to differentiate various client/vendor relationships in global software work are sometimes undefined and sometimes inconsistent. This lack of consistent definition complicated their search of this literature. More significantly, it can be asked whether the field of global software engineering can develop without a generally accepted definition of the foundational terms associated with global outsourcing.

To rectify this situation, the authors conducted a Delphi study with ten researchers, which resulted in a glossary of outsourcing terms used in global software engineering literature. In addition, the authors developed a taxonomy that links these terms in a client/vendor hierarchy relative to the location of the vendor, the geographical distance between the client and the vendor, the time zone difference between the client and vendor locations, and the legal relationship of the vendor to the client.

The findings of the paper are neither surprising nor novel. Because the definitions of the terms that the authors arrived at after two rounds of the Delphi process are so natural and self-evident, it is hard to relate to the nature of the difficulty these experts encountered in parsing these well-known terms. Although these definitions are useful, it is not clear that they are sufficient to describe the multilayer relationships and roles of captive centers with the host organization. A critical weakness of this study is that it focused primarily on the papers and participants of the annual International Conference on Global Software Engineering and ignored the extensive literature on information technology (IT) outsourcing in the information systems/management information systems (IS/MIS) field and foreign factory/foreign subsidiaries literature in the management field.