category: Bespoke Software Development, English
Software development outsourcers will generally take work from anywhere, provided they have the skills to do it. However, I think that this isn’t always the best approach. One common complaint from outsourcers is that they are just used as an overflow body shop and their skills and consultancy aren’t really valued.
Every software development team has an issue or task tracking system in place. While on the face of it this sounds like a very positive thing, it can actually be the source of project delays and other problems. Offshore development and in-house teams each have their own tracking tools that they understand and are comfortable with.
My last post was about ensuring quality in the short term. This one is about achieving long-term quality in offshore development. At Future Processing we have the maxim, “Quality Always Makes Sense” displayed on the wall because I believe it should be fundamental to software development.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about quality. Since then I’ve received quite a few emails on the topic. It seems that many companies offshoring software development are struggling with the quality- scope trade-off. This is a hot issue for outsourcers too.
Yesterday: a rather frustrating meeting with a potential customer. He has made the decision to near-shore an application development project. However what he is looking for is to have some of the development team on site for the duration of the project.
At a seminar I attended last week, I got talking to Tomas, the managing director of another software development outsourcer.
If you’ve ever been a software developer, no matter when or where, the chances are that at some point you’ve had to work with some poorly written (read nightmare) legacy code. For whatever reason the code has stopped working or needs to be enhanced and you’ve been the poor sap has to work out why on earth the initial coder wrote the programme this way.
For many project managers, both in-house or at an outsourcer, estimating the time different software development tasks will take is one of the hardest parts of their job. So much time and energy is spent by development teams trying to come up with scientific methods to estimate task time.
Hiring an offshore outsourcing company makes sense when you are looking to increase the output of your IT department without the expense of hiring additional staff. A software development outsourcer can take care of the back log of work your IT department is struggling with. Offshore software outsourcing frees your staff to focus on the core work that really fits their skills.