Does anyone have real-life experience with working with a programmer in countries like India through a service like Technical Outsourcing or Coders4rent.com? Tell me your stories. Was it easy to convey requirements? Were you happy with the communication? With the quality of the work?
November 18th, 2003 at 2:29 am
The company I work for has offices in Bangalore and we use them as an extension of our local development staff. I have found that it is somewhat similar to using any outsourcing shop, but with a little more detail needed in the communication area. We have added more detail to our outsourced work that goes to India in the requirements phase and we have upped our quality checking (QC). These have come down a little bit as they have learned our processes and standards. One nice thing is we can have a daily iterative process where we ship work off in the evening and by morning we have samples or initial work products to review and provide feedback.
There are factors that have improved our success: 1) ship only projects that are firm and have set requirements 2) have a consistent contact and hopefully a consistent team (really good for advice for work done anywhere) 3) find somebody local to you that is familiar with the culture, which will help smooth communications and understanding.