Significanlty lower development costs in high quality development

[espeo]

Hello,

have you had chance to develop software with some outsourced devs? I'm curious about your general impressions, especially in terms of maintaining high quality development standards, not only lower development costs (what is usually one of the major reasons to use outsourcing or nearshoring).

Actually we do provide outsourced/nearshored software development services with our office located in central Europe - Poland, we still have significantly lower rates than typical Western European level. On the other hand in comparison to typical outsourcing locations (e.g. Asia) we cannot compete with their prices, but in matter of quality (incl. modern methodologies, like Agile, Scrum), availability, communication or even travelling issues we certainly can and we often win the battle :)

The most crucial thing is to overcome the client's needs to look at price at first - any thoughts how to do this?

Or maybe you want to try us out on your own?

Looking for any interesting responses to this, thanks.

p.s. I can be reached e.g. on Skype: tomasz.rakowski_espeo

[Eranga]

In my experience we cannot measure the quality of any product. It's really challenging stuff. Basically it's relative things, person to person the way they look at gives different comments.

When you define the price on it, actually what we have to things about is the resource we have to allocate for the development. Technologies, developers skills and total man power, time required, etc. With the experience it's possible to define that figure. And at the same time, more importantly, if you want to do a business in global scale defenitly you've to things about the communities you are going to deal with, there income and so on. Otherwise they may not able to buy your stuff. Actually that is why lots of suppliers define regional prices on there products.

[gcalvin]

My experience with outsourcing (not specifically Java) is that the difficulty revolves around knowledge of the problem domain. Outsourcers say something like "give us a sufficiently detailed specification, and we will write good code." But the problem is that a "sufficiently detailed specification" already is the code. In the real world, specifications are never complete in every detail, and the coder fills in the blanks with his own knowledge of the problem domain -- which outsourcers tend to lack (and even in-house coders need years of experience to acquire, and lots of questions to their colleagues in the meantime).

-Gary-

[espeo]

Thanks for your responses!

Eranga - it's true, however you can asses a level of client's spec achievement, at least try to. On the other hand it is always more difficult to put the quality in exact numbers to compare - and that's why clients preffer looking at price mainly, it speaks to them in a simple, clear way. As an outsourcing provider we are having rather the same price for the whole area where services are provided - in this case e.g. prices are basicly the same for the whole Western Europe, as due to a way these services are being performed, they can move from country to country easily (remote working) so different prices could harm it.

gcalvin - good point! The problem you highlighted is very common in outsourcing, it's true. Our idea to deal with it is providing services in Agile methodology - where often only brief info is enough to begin development, even outsourced one, and thanks to good communication all can be delivered in budget and on time.

On the other hand the outsourcing company must have an experience and knowledge about Agile- because there is no time for excercises, client needs real work, real outcome. As far as we are concerned, with more than 2 years of exp in Agile development (of Java mainly), it seems it's a good direction - starting with 1 European client, now we've got 3 Western European destinations (Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands) and now entering German and wider UK market. Just one thing - I wish it went faster :rolleyes:

[Eranga]

My experience with outsourcing (not specifically Java) is that the difficulty revolves around knowledge of the problem domain. Outsourcers say something like "give us a sufficiently detailed specification, and we will write good code." But the problem is that a "sufficiently detailed specification" already is the code. In the real world, specifications are never complete in every detail, and the coder fills in the blanks with his own knowledge of the problem domain -- which outsourcers tend to lack (and even in-house coders need years of experience to acquire, and lots of questions to their colleagues in the meantime).

-Gary-

Specifications are never ever completed when we get it from the client. Time to time it has changed. Actually sometime our clients takes more that 2 months to added everything in a specification and send us. Even we get it the way it could be implemented in technologies is totally different. Means that real problem and the implementation has a huge gap.

[Eranga]

As an outsourcing provider we are having rather the same price for the whole area where services are provided - in this case e.g. prices are basicly the same for the whole Western Europe, as due to a way these services are being performed, they can move from country to country easily (remote working) so different prices could harm it

Actually in my experience regional pricing works really fine. We have done it several times, works extremely fine. Point I think is that whatever we developed/implemented everything tightly bind with the economy, or simply money. How much a person can spend on a specific product or a service.