Indian Development Teams

[too_many_details]

I've had mixed experiences with offshore teams. The best approach is to have an onshore liaison who can deal with the offshore developers.

I used to be quite bitter about jobs in IT going offshore. Back in '03 I found my rates being drastically undercut by freelance Indians charging about £100 per day.

Things are a lot better now, mainly because its big corporates who are still naive to think IT work can be done by anyone who can (barely) program whereas I have been fortunate to work for companies who have changed their work practices to make it work.

R

[51st State]

hmmmm, outsourcing has been around for many years. I'm surprised this is the first time you have encountered it!

What you describe is fairly common when the client is naive enough to think offshore developers == local developers. To make it work better, you have to change your approach.

Get your specs 100% right and it will all work perfectly is one option!

R

What he said.

They take a bit more managing from a progress reporting angle as well. They tend to be all "happy clappy no problems here" until the day before they're due to deliver; and then drop a bombshell that they've another month to go. If you let 'em.

Top tip: Always ensure that their necessaries aren't slipping.

[moorfield]

They tend to be all "happy clappy no problems here" until the day before they're due to deliver;

Yes and they nod their heads a lot from side to side - have you noticed that ?

[MarillionFan]

What he said.

They take a bit more managing from a progress reporting angle as well. They tend to be all "happy clappy no problems here" until the day before they're due to deliver; and then drop a bombshell that they've another month to go. If you let 'em.

Top tip: Always ensure that their necessaries aren't slipping.

Yep. Thats the way. I flew over before Xmas to see my new super duper system and do final tests, having been told it was all working, only to find it was a piece of crap and I would have been embarrassed by it. Almost killed the guy

[beaker]

I know the feeling. I had to deliver a system to an end client using an Indian outsourcer, who was selected by my client. Never again.

I had all the same problems as you - they got to a month before completion, then said they need another month, they said they said things were done when they weren't, testing was woeful inadequate. I was allocated a local account manager, and an offshore account director, programme manager, project manager, team leader and 4 full time developers. This was on a 9K budget.

Communication was very difficult - I found that IM worked best as they understood written English better than spoken.

We had a detailed functional spec (80 pages) and key wireframes for each screen. I single handedly put the project over budget as I spent 3 times more time than expected micro managing these guys.

When the system was delivered, and at last worked, they hadn't used the coding standards or technologies they agreed to at the start of the project.

False economies if you ask me. With the amount of management overhead involved I could have used a contract frontend and backend developer locally and finished the job on time and to a better quality.

[RSoles]

In which case one might as well write and implement the bloddy thing oneself.

Afraid so.

I think a lot of the problem comes down to cultural differences.
The bigest gripe I had was that they don't ever ask questions, even where the requirement is blatently wrong(I'm talking about off-shore Indians and Chinese here). It's second nature to a European, but these guys seem to see it as losing face, or maybe even insubordination.
Reporting a project slip is a loss of face too, hence put off like a trip to the dentist.....

I once saw a piece of outsourced code to implement a three for two offer.
It was about ten times the size I'd expected, so I took a closer peek. They'd implemented every combination of buy two items and get the third free, buy three items and get the most expensive one free, buy three items and get the least expensive one free (hurrah!), buy three items and get the middle priced one free (?), buy three items and get the first one you chose free, buy three items and get the last one you chose free, buy three items and get the middle one free buy three items and get a fourth one free.....

Clearly the programer(s?) had never seen a three-for-two offer,
I'll have two Mars bars and a Rolls Royce please!

Again, we were working through an on-site representative. All bugs (sorry, change requests) had to be channelled through him. The turnaround was 2-3 weeks if we were lucky.....


RS

[VectraMan]

My experience was on one project I had to use an application that had been developed by the parent company's Indian team, and basically found it was full of holes and not fit for purpose. The irony was my project was having to go through lots of new quality procedures that the client had inherited from the parent company (the client had recently been acquired), but our first experience with a "released" product from the parent company was that it basically didn't work. I think a few questions were asked.

I'm sure it's a case of somebody ticks the "yes it passes quality control" box and nobody higher up ever thinks to check it beyond that. That's what you get for introducing more layers of "process" and "management".

[BrilloPad]

So whats the deal with Indian Development teams. Just had a project go two months over, which was interesting considering it was a six week project.

Not allowed to talk directly to the developers, have to go through the manager, who doesnt manage. Everything is sequential.

Went to a meeting and there were 20 people in it, of which only two spoke. Why?!?! WHY?!?

The whole thing was literal, no thought placed into anything, if it looked wrong, they programmed it wrong, when I questioned it, the team would say, well it looked wrong but thats what the BRD says, so we did it that way!!!!

Arggahhhhh!!

Has anyone had a successful implementation using an outsourced Indian dev team?

team at clientco increased from 16 to 18 - both Indian developers. the current developers are bad enough - this could be really interesting.

still it will show how good I am!

when will companies realize there are no savings to be had?

[moorfield]

The bigest gripe I had was that they don't ever ask questions, even where the requirement is blatently wrong(I'm talking about off-shore Indians and Chinese here). It's second nature to a European, but these guys seem to see it as losing face, or maybe even insubordination.
Reporting a project slip is a loss of face too, hence put off like a trip to the dentist.....

Too true. On my last gig we called this "Raj mentality" - the Englishman is theirs to serve not question.

[shelby68]

Worked for three companies now who have outsourced development all disasters, last company's app had the highest number of faults of anything they had ever developed by the time the offshore boys had finished with it,

Test team were pulling their hair out with the level of faults, well they were till they got offshored to....

Our brilliant consultancies answer to this abysmal level of quality, get more cheap offshore developers to fix the faults, genius.