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

On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 09:01:36AM -0700, Hassan Schroeder wrote:
> 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; 

> 2) you think you're paying development professionals for quality, e.g.
 
> 3) be specific about your dev and deployment environments, and

[snip]

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

My experiencs are pretty much the same.  I have had some incredibly
shoddy work delivered to me in the past (which we didn't accept and
didn't pay for).  However I believe it can work.  I have a friend
who runs some development with a mix of in-house people, on-shore
foreign contractors for company X and an off-shore team (also for
company X).  They have had issues in the past but it seems to be
going well at the moment.  It has taken visits to their off-shore
team; and they do have a long-term, ongoing, commitment to a 
fair amount of work; and fairly explicit specifications.

-- 
Andy Leighton => [email protected]
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials" 
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_