The notion that unimportant work is being outsourced no-more holds true. The software development magazine conducted a survey in October 2003 to find what kind of work was being outsourced. The 414 respondents (engineers and development managers) who were working on partially or completely outsourced projects opined that important but non-critical work was being outsourced the most. Also, unnecessary and trivial work was not being outsourced to such a large extent. The survey findings are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Outsourced work according to importance of the work Source: Software Development Magazine

Also, only specific tasks in the complete lifecycle of a product or service are not being outsourced now. In the same survey, it was found that there was no activity in the entire software development lifecycle that was not outsourced. Coding, testing, maintenance, code migration, documentation and designing were the most outsourced tasks in the software industry, while activities such as business integration, requirements gathering, architecture, and research and development were less outsourced. Responses of the participants in this survey have been summarized in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Activities being outsourced in software development Source: Software Development Magazine