Software Sweatshop

Got a nice email from Giovanna Villanueva this week, a reader of SoftwareSweatshop.com . A pparently she has an outsourcing horror story and decided to share. Notice that outsourcing failure doesn’t typically occur at the programming level, it’s usually a result of poor project management and lousy communication. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking to outsource .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails development, if your offshore team isn’t communicating with you on a regular basis, the project is headed for disaster. You can read her outsourcing story for yourself here. Here are some lessons she learned:

1. Conduct intensive research: Ask them a lot of questions and also contact a few of their past clients to know more about their performance and habits. The only issue is that most references provided will be good ones, so it doesn’t give much insight. It’s probably a good idea to start a pilot project so you can see how responsive the team is, the types of questions they ask, and how well they understand you.

2. Deal with companies directly: Should you consider working with an offshore broker, make sure they have been in the field for a number of years. Don’t work with people who are new at brokering outsourcing projects because their lack of experience will be at your expense.

3. Have an iron clad contract: ‘Nuff said. Spell out vacation/sick days, intellectual property rights, etc. Working with a firm with a US presence definitely gives you more recourse

4. Be careful when hiring individuals: Make sure you’re confident with their competency and communication before assigning them work. It also helps to start out with smaller projects. Working with development firms with a well defined corporate culture, solid experience, and development methodology is critical.