What does the offshoring backlash tell us?

Reader Poll We’ve had some great responses back on the article we posted earlier in the week, about how software development is becoming increasingly distributed with the twin prongs of outsourcing (vs keeping things in-house) and offshoring (vs keeping things local). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the most spleen is vented on failed offshore projects.

To quote one such rant in its entirety:

After 2 years of excuses, laziness, constant turnover (complete waste of training time when the guy/girl buggers off and leaves you with a new muppet), terrible or copied-from-Google code, never-ending bugs, headaches, baffling phone calls where no-one understood each other, emails that promised to "do the needful" but went ignored, applications that just didn't work, MILLIONS of dollars, and much, much more....... we had enough, and told the Indian coding behemoth we'd had enough and brought our dev team back in house.

Saying that things go more smoothly is a massive understatement. Don't know why we bothered. Oh yes, some spreadsheet said it would be cheaper.

Ouch. And we thought Google code was supposed to be good (just kidding, we knew what they meant really). But what is causing the problems - particularly given that at the end of the day, code is code?

The answer seems to be in no small part down to good communications, driven (in no small part either) by a level of connectedness to the business. There was a level of good-enough-ness in the past, we are told, which was adequate to support more successful development activities, and which is impossible to replicate across contractual and international boundaries:

This informal communication is completely lost when parts of a project are outsourced. Sending the same spec to another country to be evaluated by a developer who has never met the author and who must route all queries through an account manager just does not work.

And:

Yes, there is a loss of informal communications, and of developers with the deeper knowledge of the "widget" business that comes from being part of the "widget" industry and not the software consulting industry.

It's ironic perhaps, that it is the business’s perceived failure of understanding this need to communicate that lies at the root of the problem, so we are told. Says one of our correspondents:

The one thing that has remained the same is the core business. Whether it's being a supermarket, a plumber, a bank or whatever - this is what makes the money that payes everyones' wages - not the IT element of the organisation. So when the opportunity presents itself to get shot of the whole kit 'n' kaboodle you shouldn't be surprised when the board of directors breathes a sigh of relief and signs a very large cheque”

To be fair, things never really did run that smoothly in the past. Which begs the question - given that the genie of international resourcing most likely won’t just hop back into the bottle, just what can we learn from less successful outsourcing experiences? Or perhaps more pointedly, if we take such emotive terms as ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring’ out of the equation, what can we learn about the increasingly distributed development organisations that exist, and how well they are operating?

We’ve put together a short reader poll to consider some of these questions, and we’d love to hear your views.

Reader Poll