[thelist] Outsourcing

Hershel Robinson hershel at galleryrobinson.com
Fri Aug 11 09:07:37 CDT 2006


Hershel Robinson wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> To those of you who replied, I thank you.
> 
> The responses to my question were all extremely useful for me and many 
> of you took the time to write out long and detailed explanations of the 
> experience and caveats of outsourcing and I appreciate it.

I am now able to report back to thelist the end of this story. For those
of you who may recall, I began this thread in January of this year
asking for advice regarding using outsourcing for a new build (version 2
of an existing webapp). I took the job as the project manager and we put
in a LOT of man-hours developing our documentation (Functional
Specification, Coding Standards) and a full database schema, reviewing
the team presented to us, working with them, reviewing their code in
detail, including sending back to them notes as to what needs fixing in
their coding and their approach.

We gave them a test module to build. A module which, in large part, is
separate from other core modules of the system. They guaranteed us
delivery on a certain date.

The code they are producing today IS acceptable. In the beginning, it
was, in a word, atrocious. Both the PHP and the HTML/CSS. It took a
great deal of time and patience to get them to understand how to code
properly, however.

In the end however, this is the letter my boss is sending to their CEO,
who personally became involved in this project once we saw it going off
the deep end:

====
These delays are beyond ridiculous at this point and we are out of
patience. You clearly don't have the ability to deliver on your
promises. We've spent a lot of money mentoring your team and have
already lost a significant amount of time on our project - we cannot
afford to continue.  Please send us a full refund of the money we've
paid you to date.
====

Naturally YMMV and I *did* demand very high standards for the code, but
I thought I would share my experience.

Hershel

-- 
Web Site Construction by Gallery Robinson
http://galleryrobinson.com/




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