Outsourcing Development

[Goksly]

Hi,
Just curious if anyone has experience with outsourcing development to other companies / countries?

Background:
I run a development team (4 developers in total including myself) for a small company. We've got a lot, and I mean a lot, of work on our schedule. We've prioritised and working top down but so many last minute things crop up due to how the business needs to react with client requests, we want to shift some of the bigger projects to another company.

We've not got the budget to add any perm staff, but my line manager just wants us to be in a position where we can flex up our development resource where required (typically when the client is going to pay for the development - so cash flow short term isn't an issue).

I've done some research and contacted some companies in Malta and Vietnam, but in both cases they want a minimum term contract for 5 people for between 3 and 12 months.

Requirement
We want to be able to put together some documentation (standards, specification, functional requirements etc.) and send it to a company on an adhoc basis (obviously with some notice!) and get it developed. For cost purposes we'd like somewhere offshore. So has anyone got any recommendations, any positive / negative experiences etc?

Cheers!

 

[D.P.]

I've had good experience in some projects I have worked on, don't listen to the gloom mongers.

However, adhoc projects probably wont work as well as others. You get better results with longer term projects where you can help manage the outsourced team and reiterate. Some companies are better than others, some teams within the same company are better than others and some of the mangers are better than other. You need to work through a few companies to get the results you want and then stick with them.

The costs are often cheap enough to start with 2 companies at once and then after a few months you can reevaluate and drop the worse company. Saying that you tend to get what you pay for - I woudn't hunt around for the cheapest prices thats for sure.

 

[Haircut]

However, adhoc projects probably wont work as well as others. You get better results with longer term projects where you can help manage the outsourced team and reiterate.

Agree completely with this.
The outsourcing models that I've seen work the best have generally been ongoing support and BAU work.

You'll need to make sure that you have things locked down pretty tightly on your side as an agile approach is hard to do when the outsourced developers have limited contact with you (and probably even less with any actual customers)
The fact that you mention reacting to client requests in the OP suggests this may be a hard thing to do.

I guess it depends on exactly the sort of stuff you'd expect them to do - if it's small, self contained pieces of work then that can work well.
If they will be working on a shared codebase that the onshore dev team has built up over a period of time then it becomes more difficult to manage.