[thelist] Outsourcing

Hershel Robinson hershelr at netvision.net.il
Mon Jan 30 10:03:12 CST 2006


I was approached by a potential client last week. He has a medium sized 
web app which has undergone such patching over the years that he is 
ready for a rebuild from scratch. He is working on the proposal now. His 
plan is to outsource the actual programming to cheap programmers in 
India or the former Soviet Union from one of the various websites 
offering such services.

He told me that his research indicates that "if you do your due 
diligence there are some very reliable programmers." He is looking to 
build in PHP/MySQL using an MVC pattern.

He is looking to hire me (or someone like me) to be a technical manager 
to oversee the outsourced programmers and to understand the code and to 
be able to arrange a transfer to a different outsource firm in the 
middle should things go sour and also to be able to work within the code 
after the build is done, for further changes etc.

What do people think about his idea of outsourcing? I wonder about the 
quality of the code which will be produced. The quality of the backend 
code, how true it will be to an MVC pattern, the quality of the produced 
frontend code, how valid (HTML and CSS) it will be, will it use CSS 
layout or even CSS for appropriate formatting.

Even if we require all these things from the programmers, what will be 
the quality of the code itself and therefore how easy it will be to 
continue to work in it?

I have not given a final answer to this client and were I to present a 
strong case, he might be open to changing his plans. I myself am not 
convinced either way. It could well be that either the code will not be 
bad, or that it won't be really bad, yet it's still worth the savings he 
realizes by outsourcing.

Anyone have any experience to share?

Thanks,
Hershel



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