Re: What are the most important issues during offshore software development

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 9:49 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:

> So to understand well about offshore software development, I just raise this
> question. If somebody had such experience and you want to share your story,
> that is awesome!

From my somewhat limited (and Web-oriented) experience:

1) timezone differences can really blow your schedule; finding a
     problem during integration this morning "here" -- when everyone
     "there" is unavailable --  means a whole day lost.

2) you think you're paying development professionals for quality, e.g.
     current best practices and standards-compliant work -- but you're
     almost certainly wrong. Expect non-semantic, invalid, deprecated
     markup and horrible code, unless the pointy-haired project owner
     has spec'd otherwise -- and yeah, sorry I made you laugh :-)

3) be specific about your dev and deployment environments, and
     insist that the offshore team replicate at least the latter for their
     own testing.

     If that's an obstacle -- meaning they're not familiar enough with
     the deployment components to set it up quickly -- you're already
     in trouble.

4) be specific about acceptance criteria: "well, it works in Internet
     Explorer" is not a phrase to hear at any point, particularly late in
     the dev cycle.

Obviously these observations are based on negative experience with
offshore development; unfortunately, I haven't had a positive one yet :-)

YMMV,
-- 
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ [email protected]