I actually was on the both sides. So I know how it looks like from inside and outside. I’m going to describe several problems, which you can, probably, face to, starting to work with some software development outsourcing. 1. Guys there think another way. They, probably, did not read peopleware and other books, you’ve read. They could be surprised by schedule you provide them or have in mind, but they could say nothing. Some that guys think that as they are pay hourly, it is not their problems to correct your schedule. You are lucky if have experienced team lead/PM on site to let you know about project risks. The usual rule applies: more expensive teams/companies/developers could cost you less overall. Actually the main problem here is integration. Let me tell you about 2 projects I worked for. One from outsourcing side, and another from US side. On both projects US side wrote business logic and remote team wrote UI. If you do things this way you can be already in trouble of bad integration. 2. Remote guys sleep when on site team works and vice versa. If you are lucky, you can, probably, have an hour or two of overlapping time. It means that if one of the teams have a bug it will
be fixed next day only, causing huge problems to another team. In worse case they could loose whole day. 3. If teams do not have common source repository it is another big issue. If some team do some refactoring it affects another team – other team’s code become uncompilable. Even bigger evil here is integration. On the second project I participated that way we had 2 guys on US side constantly working on integration tasks only, stating from second week of development, when we tried to integrate our code (!). On the similar project before we had only 3 guys on site doing UI, before the same task was transferred to outsourcing team. Can you imagine that? 3 guys did job here and after switching to outsourcing it were 2 guys doing integration tasks! On the first project bugs in business logic prevented UI developers from testing their code. Okay, it is not always so bad, and sure, it make sense to have outsourcing in many cases. Here is what you can do to have successful outsourcing: 1. If it is possible, let outsourcing do all parts of the job. That will save you from integration evil. Remember, that if you can’t let outsourcing do all parts of the task, integration is your biggest risk here; 2. Even if you were lucky with 1., make all your teams to write unit tests and run continuous integration everyday or even more often in all teams. It will at least help your teams to prevent most of integration issues, and help them to find their bugs earlier; 3. If it is possible, all teams should store their code in the same source control system. This will help teams to do successful refactoring, even changing other team’s code. To let it work better all teams should try to commit code before end of day, to let remote team successfully refactor. If it is not possible, new code from remote team should be committed to local repository daily; 4. Make business logic team to write all interfaces and mockups before writing actual code. The actual code could take much time, since interfaces and mockups are easy. It will also help your teams to write unit tests and to set up continuous integration tasks early. Hope it will help you to choose right way and good luck with outsourcing if you are going to use it!
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