Offshoring development services

[Ceinari]

Software Product Development has obtained an edge by Offshoring development services. Offshoring such services increases the responsibility of Product management and Software Development. In order to ensure efficiency and feasibility of the processes and to deliver a customized product, testing and quality assurance checks are conducted. Apart from testing an important task is often overlooked, that is, documentation of software design for future maintenance and enhancement. What are the other aspects in Offshore Software Product Development that need attention in order to leverage quality and reduce time to market? Please suggest.

 

[Nik_2213]

Slightly off-topic, but off-shoring can come back to bite you when you lose team continuity, or need to upgrade the project for new hardware, browser or OS version...

eg Some years ago, I did a lot of work using a real-neat 3D house-plan program. As well as pushing it beyond its design specs, many hours of 'trial and error' found how to craft wall-cutting 3DS doors and windows of my own design. This was a known facility, but totally un-documented. Besides, I wanted bespoke 'stone arch' styles...

Sadly, 'program bloat' and my ever-more-complex Medieval-ish plan progressively slowed operation to a crawl...

You guessed it: I had a LOT of RAM, but the program was only accessing a fraction of it, instead thrashing the swap-file...
( Reached the stage where I installed a 'small' but very fast E: Drive to host the swap-file. That bought me six months... )

An updated program version was promised, re-compiled to access more RAM. Sadly, the program owners and the 'off-shore' team had a dire dispute over legacy intellectual property, licensing of the re-compiled code etc. Eventually, the program owners abandoned development of the old code, licensed a completely different 3D engine.

Yes, this was faster, could handle lots more RAM etc etc but, due to those 'intellectual property' issues, had a very different 'Look & Feel', could not import my self-cutting architectural details, could not read prior plans as-is.

Again due to 'intellectual property' issues, the long-promised conversion utility never appeared. Nothing will read the original, proprietary format, thus orphaning my sprawling, half-completed project...

In theory, I could start again using eg TurboCAD, but it would be an order of magnitude harder than using the original program's neat architectural tools...
{ Spit !! }

Due Care, Please !!