IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.20 No.4, April 2020 6 Manuscript received April 5, 2020 Manuscript revised April 20, 2020 Towards Offshore Software Maintenance Outsourcing Process Model Atif Ikram 1,2 , Masita Abdul Jalil 1 , Amir Bin Ngah 1 , Ahmad Salman Khan 3 , aikram4u@gmail.com 1 School of Informatics and Applied Mathematics, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Malaysia 2 Department of CS&IT, The University of Lahore, Pakistan 3 Department of Software Engineering, The University of Lahore, Pakistan Summary Software maintenance outsourcing (SMO) is performed from developed countries to developing countries to gain different advantages like reducing the cost and securing time to pay attention to research and development of new products. This process of outsourcing between two (or more) different countries is called offshore software maintenance outsourcing. Both client and vendor face different kinds of problems during the execution of offshore software maintenance outsourcing (OSMO). In literature, a considerable contribution exists for software development outsourcing but OSMO is still an under- researched activity. This study aims to propose an OSMO process model. The proposed OSMO process model will address the problems of both client and vendor in the OSMO context. It is expected that the proposed an OSMO process model will help both the client and vendor organizations to make the OSMO services a success story Key words: Offshore, Software Maintenance, Outsourcing, Process Model, Machine Learning. 1. Introduction Software systems play a vital role in our daily life. The moment a software system is deployed in some operational setting, it enters into the maintenance phase. The maintenance is required to keep the software system alive according to customer needs. IT organizations have to depute software maintenance teams to provide software maintenance services. Software maintenance outsourcing includes outsourcing of pre and post-delivery activities, code maintenance, bug fixing, feature enhancement, GUI enhancement, software upgrades [6,13], etc. Literature divides maintenance into four categories named as corrective (bug fixing), adaptive (to cope with environmental change), perfective (changes originated from user request) [7] and preventive maintenance (to make software more maintainable) [8]. Software maintenance is the lengthiest stage by covering around 70% cost of a software lifecycle [9,10] and requires a lot of effort [63,65]. Software maintenance outsourcing is a complex activity spanning across the whole lifecycle of the system involving multiple stakeholders. Offshore outsourcing is a practice in which companies hire services (or products) from another country. Offshore software maintenance outsourcing (OSMO) domain brings more complexity for stakeholders involved [41]. These stakeholders face many challenges. The challenges begin from the early phase of deciding on outsourcing the software maintenance till the system retirement. The retirement process is the retirement of an existing system by withdrawing it from operation and support [11]. The studies [1,2,3] and additional ones, indicated in Section 5 of this study, discuss challenges and issues related to software maintenance outsourcing but offshore context is missing. The poor management of SMO may lead to poor quality of maintenance services and in the worst case could lead to business loss, as maintenance covers a major portion (70%) of SDLC [9,10]. So, it is praiseworthy and of significant importance to propose such a process model that can address offshore software maintenance outsourcing related issues. The aim of this study is to propose an OSMO Process Model. The proposed model will address OSMO related issues from decision-making until the execution of software maintenance outsourcing. The remaining of the current study is as follows. Section 2 is about Problem Statement, Section 3 is about Objectives, Section 4 is about Scope, Section 5 is about Literature review, Section 6 contains Proposed model, Section 7 is about Research methodology while Section 8 is about Conclusion and Expected results of the current study. 2. Problem Statement In OSMO the software maintenance related services (activities) are outsourced from developed countries towards developing countries. In the outsourcing process, developed countries are known as client and developing countries are known as vendors. Both vendors and clients