01 October 2008

Can't see offshore software development working for any complex project

What does the offshoring backlash tell us? • The Register

Quite funny

After 2 years of excuses, laziness, constant turnover (complete waste of training time when the guy/girl buggers off and leaves you with a new muppet), terrible or copied-from-Google code, never-ending bugs, headaches, baffling phone calls where no-one understood each other, emails that promised to "do the needful" but went ignored, applications that just didn't work, MILLIONS of dollars, and much, much more....... we had enough, and told the Indian coding behemoth we'd had enough and brought our dev team back in house. Saying that things go more smoothly is a massive understatement. Don't know why we bothered. Oh yes, some spreadsheet said it would be cheaper.
This informal communication is completely lost when parts of a project are outsourced. Sending the same spec to another country to be evaluated by a developer who has never met the author and who must route all queries through an account manager just does not work.