So,
Thinking about Off-shoring again, Dave Donaldson sent me a link to this blog post. His post made me wonder if there are fundamental flaws in the off-shoring model. First, I guess I need to know how off-shored engagements typically work. My guess would be that some sort of use case / design doc is delivered to the remote team. The remote team begins the dev phase, with frequent milestones and deliverables. Hopefully, there's a good deal of user testing along the way. Is this generally correct?
Now, if I'm right, haven't we decided that this model doesn't really work? I mean, isn't it pretty much common knowledge these days that software can't be designed and then handed off to a team of developers, wherever they are? What about spiral, iterative development? What about Agile software development. Don't these models produce better software? If so, can they be integrated with offshoring?
All this reminds me of the whole debate between self-paced and instructor-led training. I spent a lot of my early career building systems for delivering CD-ROM and WBT training. It all sounded great. Just package up the knowledge and send it out there! Yeah! People will be way into that!
Well, I'm afraid to say that 10 years later, I realize that it just doesn't work too well. Nothing beats iterative, interactive learning with a human being involved as the facilitator. A good friend of mine heads up a fortune 500's internal training department. He's opted mainly for good old instructor-led training. And he even once started a company focused on self-paced instruction!
So, what does this all have to do with off-shoring? Well, I think that the more you remove the human, hour-to-hour contact with the entire software development team, the more likely you are to fail. Just as you can't send some instruction off into the great wide open and expect some student to get it, you can't send a bunch of requirements off to some far-off team and expect them to code it!
I dunno. Am I wrong? Well, I've never been involved in an off-shored engagement, so I'm wondering if people could respond here with their stories, good or bad.
-Brendan