Offshore website SW development

[Luc]

We're trying to set-up a new Internet platform for a new type of business, requiring development of new modules starting from existing open source. Estimated 2-3 months work.

Due to other obligations, the time we can spend developing ourselves is limited and because of the high uncertainty of the business, we don't want to spend huge budgets to get started. But we do have the knowledge to define the requirements and check the quality of the work.

Offshoring the development (India or elsewhere) might be an alternative. Does anyone have real experience with this? I've seen other threads, but we have some specific questions:

- how do you find a reliable partner?
- is a weekly code review realistic?
- if we see after a month that the quality is insufficient, can the outsourcing be stopped?
- any idea of price levels?
- can you become the owner of the code when the work is finished?

Looking forward to your suggestions.

[Astaroth]

1) Recommendations? Visiting in person? Trial & error?

2) It is realistic but remember you will be billed for the time to prepare it etc. You also need to remember that for any operation there are probably 1000 ways you can code it so need to ensure you have a technical specification or such before hand so you can see how all the coding fits into the bigger picture

3) That comes down to your contract. Naturally expect to pay more for more breakpoints or clauses that allow termination

4) As web developers here vary massively in price so do those in other countries. Depends if you are employing a large professional organisation or an individual who reoutsources the work to his friends/ colleagues etc

5) All comes down to contracts again. Remember that enforcing the contract will be much more difficult across international boundaries and so whilst your contract may state you have sole rights to the code if you find a site in 4 months time running off the same engine in outer mongolia it will be difficult to make a recovery from your developers (but not necessarily impossible)

[stasilo]

We're trying to set-up a new Internet platform for a new type of business, requiring development of new modules starting from existing open source. Estimated 2-3 months work.

Due to other obligations, the time we can spend developing ourselves is limited and because of the high uncertainty of the business, we don't want to spend huge budgets to get started. But we do have the knowledge to define the requirements and check the quality of the work.

Offshoring the development (India or elsewhere) might be an alternative. Does anyone have real experience with this? I've seen other threads, but we have some specific questions:

- how do you find a reliable partner?
- is a weekly code review realistic?
- if we see after a month that the quality is insufficient, can the outsourcing be stopped?
- any idea of price levels?
- can you become the owner of the code when the work is finished?

Looking forward to your suggestions.

If you are developer yourself it would make assesment of quality of work easier. From time to time I am getting projects to fix Indian developers stuff and sometimes it's just beyond the limit the things that they do. sometimes you see massive sites and there are no sql injection checks.
the funny thing that people in uk here quite often pay local company something like £50 per hour and their stuff is still being developed in India. they just don't know about it. :)

[Astaroth]

There are cultural aspects to things.... my experience of Indian developers is all very consistent in that they say they can do anything and are not adversed to breaking "the rules".

This can be good, spotting a spelling mistake in a business requirements document and the lead developer just changes it thus avoiding corporate change control processes (and delays) can have its benefits but at the same time I have seen some of the most terrible methodologies used to achieve a solution because they over promised (including calling all records from a 2 million full table, storing 2 copies of it as a dataset in the web servers memory and running queries against the dataset via IIS rather than on the SQL server)

[stasilo]

There are cultural aspects to things.... my experience of Indian developers is all very consistent in that they say they can do anything and are not adversed to breaking "the rules".

This can be good, spotting a spelling mistake in a business requirements document and the lead developer just changes it thus avoiding corporate change control processes (and delays) can have its benefits but at the same time I have seen some of the most terrible methodologies used to achieve a solution because they over promised (including calling all records from a 2 million full table, storing 2 copies of it as a dataset in the web servers memory and running queries against the dataset via IIS rather than on the SQL server)
yes. that kind of thing.