SurvivingOutsourcing
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Contents |
Surviving Outsourcing: More than a Zero Sum Game?
Premise
This workshop attempted to provide a way for attendees to consider how, where and if outsourcing could be of positive benefit to them and their organisations and how they could work with outsourced staff to ensure the quality of the results.
Conclusions
Towards the end of the workshop we tried to apply lessons learned to put together problem/solution pairs that could start to form part of a toolbox to be applied by organizations involved in outsourcing.
- Problem: Higher defect injection rate than 'acceptable'
- Solution(s): Code review, test review, metrics and standards
- Problem: Misunderstanding of requirements/technology
- Solution: co-location of requirements or technology workshops
- Solution: Iterative development - regular and short code drops
- Solution: Reviews/retrospectives
- Problem: Requirements are not met - we don't get what we wanted
- Solution: Have UAT tests written early (before coding) and have thorough review. Prioritize and order against criticality.
- Solution: Don't just throw requirements over the wall - do walkthrough and test understanding
- Problem: Milestone slippage - UAT (1st entry) (still finding bugs)
- Solution: Realistic plan - quality assessment of estimates
- Solution: Get something early to: a) calibrate production rate and b) assess quality
- Solution: Enforce testing by insisting on seeing: a) results, b) test scripts, c) coverage
Interesting point/metrics from experience of offshoring. A 1000 function point piece of functionality is estimated for 10 months delivery, 6 people and 8500 hours effort. Bringing this down to 9 months increases the time effort to 14500 hours. Offshoring the same piece of work increases the delivery time to 12 montsh and increases the effort to 25000 hours.
Notes
- File:SurvivingOutsourcing1.doc by Immo
