offshoring

Offshoring/onshoring

I'm not trying to start controversy, but I'm wanting to know other's input on this sometimes touchy subject. I've read all sorts of material about how you can find competent developers in India (and now sometimes China) who are just as good as their US counterparts, but at largely reduced rate. Specifically I recently read the world is...

Does "scrum" work in offshoring?

I do a lot of work as an architect with offshore teams and some of these teams use Scrum development practices in their purest form. I'm finding problems when developers are spread so far apart with pure scrum and wondered if anyone has solutions. 80% development is remote but some team members are US side. The biggest issue is a lack ...

How do you handle poor quality code from a third party contractor in another country?

Let's just say the boss is addicted to the price of poor code, and will keep on outsourcing chunks of greenfield projects to cheap labour, only to get inhouse devs to fix the bugs. ...

How can I improve CVS performance in a multi-site scenario?

I am currently working in a project with developers working on three sites. One of the sites is in Delhi, India while the other two are in Europe. The communication between the European offices and the office in Delhi has poor bandwidth and quite bad latency, and a CVS update from there often takes 5-10 minutes even though only a few fil...

Leading Remote Development Teams

I'm now in the position that I am leading 2 remote development teams, some in India, some in the USA (I'm based in Scotland) and was looking for some advice and wisdom what will help make me more successful in this pursuit. Already I've found the following: Regular one to one sessions with each developer helps build trust immensely Co...

Offshoring: does it EVER work?

I know there has been a fair amount of discussion on here about outsourcing/offshoring, and the general opinion seems to be that at best it is difficult, and at worst it fails. I have direct experience of offshoring myself; a previous company where I was a dev manager wanted to send some development offshore, and we ran a pilot scheme t...

Is there a catchy term for repatriating work once offshored?

I think the term repatriation is specific for people. "Unshore, deshore, disremote." Every term I think up sounds like a nails scratching down a chalk board. "Inshoring" blech.... "Resourcing" "Desourcing" - "Onshoring?" ...

How do i gel with offshore team

I recently started working on project with 8 devs ( including me ) , 7 of them are on a different location ( offshore ) . Although I am co located with BA's and stakeholders , i have very little access to the actual development .The whole project is being run by a consulting firm and I am the only "outsider", so teams leads / PMs usually...

What to avoid when a project has been partially outsourced?

I've worked on outsourced projects in the past, and have seen a few enormous pitfalls. The thing is that many of those issues, in retrospect, were avoidable at some point. I've never heard of a trouble-free outsourced project, but if work's going partially overseas, what best practices avoid some of the headaches? Assume, for the pu...

Developer using offshoring

*I have been thinking of doing projects with offshore help. The idea is to use it to be able to do projects where I don't have much experience - say iPhone. Also I am looking for some of the same benefits as XP pair programming. Generally being dynamic, trying to do everything as cost-efficient as possible: I will be involved in all...

How do you bring together multi-cultural teams?

I have worked on a few multi-cultural projects (programming languages are universal, social norms and mores are not) and it's always interesting to see how the team dynamic works cross culturally. I'm not talking about coding differences, I'm talking about basic ground rules for communicating cross culturally at the start of the project...

Leading an offshore team

I'm in a position where I am leading two teams of 4. Both teams are located in India. I am on the west coast of the U.S. I'm finding leading remote teams challenging: First, their command of the English language is weak. Second, I'm having difficultly understanding them through their accents. Third is timing, we are 12 hours apart. ...