A bad experience with outsourcing in the past can really give you a sour attitude about trying it again. Some people have a visceral reaction whenever they hear the “O” word - Outsourcing. Perhaps they tried to “purchase” outsourcing services in the past and negotiated such a “good deal”, they just about guaranteed they would get poor results.

Hiring an outsourcing vendor is like hiring the employees for your internal software engineering team. Yet many companies go about selecting an outsourcing vendor as if it is a purchasing process, seeking the lowest price possible for the service.

Did you ever purchase an employee for your engineering team? Of course not. Hiring an employee takes a careful evaluation of candidates through interviews and reference checks followed by a reasonable negotiation over salary.

Sometimes you have a choice between two or more employee candidates. Do you negotiate hard so you can hire one of them at the cheapest possible salary? Probably not. If you do, you risk hiring an employee that will only stay until a better job comes along elsewhere. And then you have to start the long hiring process for a replacement all over again.

Hiring an outsourcing team is like hiring employees, and it pays to be fair and equitable. Think of the offshore team as your own team, one that you carefully hire and manage over time to get excellent results. Otherwise you face getting poor quality and having to go look for a new outsourcing vendor again. And that will cause you months of wasted time.

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A synopsis of this post was published on the Business Week website as one slide in their Outsourcing Advice from the Pros. This was an added sidebar with several articles focused on small businesses using outsourcing for manufacturing and professional services like software development.

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Just saw a press release for a new book Debugging Your Information Technology™ Career published by Elegant Fix Press and written by career consultant Janice Weinberg. I haven’t read the book yet but the press release has some detail that makes the book look interesting.

Whether you believe there is an IT job shortage or not, it is clear employees are being displaced by offshoring. More and more companies are offshoring these days and this book promises to be a valuable resource for those directly impacted by the changes and job loss.

The job loss issue comes up with Accelerance clients when they have an existing software development team that they need to expand with resources offshore. The question is what to do with the programmers you already have in-house? Instead of coding, these U.S.-based employees often become project or product managers if they stay at the company.

This book promises to offer additional choice of career change and growth.

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Selecting the right kind of engagement model with your offshore programmers (and / or the company where they work) is the best way to ensure you get more dynamic engineers that will deliver your software with the level of quality you would expect from your own software engineers in the U.S.

Generally you want a model where you have more control over the programmer hiring process and the on-going management of the software development process. But you may have to trade-off control with your budget and ability to manage the software development process. Below are the six engagement models most commonly used.

Choosing the right offshoring engagement model is a key to your success

From left to right, each model is capable of handling an increasing level of resources and control.

Freelancers – complete control over the programmers hired, but you have to evaluate each one individually. It is common to hire several on a trial basis and even have them create the same software and then keep the ones that do a good job. Managing more than three freelancers at different locations and time zones is very challenging! Good for small projects for several months or longer if you can get the freelancer(s) to commit.

Body Shops – very little control over the programmers hired. This type of vendor is famous for giving you transactional programmers cheap, but without management or software development process. You have to tell them what to do and manage them yourself. At least they’re in the same room! Okay if you have the time and resources to manage your programmers from a distance.

Software Factory – or a vendor that bids on your software project on a fixed-price basis where you generally have no control over the kind of programmers that are used. Your specifications need to be as complete as possible and have a clear definition of what it means for your software to be finished. Some disreputable vendors will deliver some software for the first several progress payments and then drop you as a client if you make many changes or have no clear definition of what “finished” really means.
Yet, this is one of the most common forms of offshoring. Works well if you have a well-specified programming project and have the budget to try several

Offshore Development Center (ODC) – a vendor that gives you a dedicated team of programmers and you can usually participate in the interviews. You pay a monthly fee for each programmer and their activities are often managed by a team leader you also help select. Good for developing multiple releases of the same software application where consistency of the programming team improves productivity over time.

Build, Operate & Transfer (BOT) – like ODC but with an option to transfer your team of programmers into your own captive operation or offshore subsidiary in future, usually two or three years.

Captive Operation – most appropriate for larger software companies that are developing complex software applications and systems needing fifty software engineers or more. You have complete control (and responsibility) for the hiring and management of the programmers.

Accelerance services can help you with the more complex, rightmost four engagement models. Use Offshoring Jumpstart to find partners that will bid on your fixed price projects and / or build your ODC. Use Rapid Ramp-Up consulting for more complex ODC, BOT and Captive Operations.

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It’s April 1st and no joke, it’s H1-B Visa day. This is the day that companies apply to the U.S. government to receive visas for foreign workers. There is a limit of 65,000 and they are issues within the first 24 hours.

NPR interviewed a software company CEO about his challenge in hiring a software architect here in the U.S.

This is a controversial issue that really strikes a nerve with those Americans that think companies (like Microsoft) are selling out by hiring cheaper foreigners instead of paying Americans what they are worth.

Even if it is true, there is reported shortage of IT talent in the U.S. that may drive up salaries anyway.

Mentioned in this interview was a study done by professors at Duke University that showed the quality of offshore workers is not. One of the professors is Vivek Wadhwa who was interviewed on NPR last year when the study was published.

I am going to post a blog about this interesting study of offshore talent very soon.

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Maybe but the number of students majoring in computer science has also cooled. There was a report on NPR this morning about this. No wonder there is a shortage of IT workers predicted for 2008.

I heard the same kind of numbers from my alma mater WPI where I am an advisor.  The number of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering majors have dropped precipitously over the last few years.

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User-centered design (UCD) requires some upfront work to discover what your target users do now so the new software you develop will fit with their natural working environment and ways of doing things. Performing significant amounts of upfront work is counter to strict Agile procedures.

The article Agile User Interface Development by Dave Churchville on the InfoQ website does a good job of describing the tradeoffs between UCD and Agile development.

The bottom line is an initial iteration to focus on user interface design is perfectly acceptable. The article mentions several techniques you can use to define your user interface such as paper prototyping, wireframing, HTML and even Visual Studio (when the end result is a .NET application).

A weakness of wireframing is it gives you sketches of your application screens but misses the sequence of how those screens are used to achieve a goal with your application (like in use cases).

Of these techniques, I like using an HTML editor the best. It enables you to define the screens and then link them together to create what I call am illustrated use case. That will show your prospective users (and global software developers) not just what each screen looks like, but also how they interact to form the complete application.

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Jeff Lopez-Stuit mentioned these five User Experience (UX) disciplines in his talk at SD West:

1. Information Architecture – the information elements and objects and business rules defining their relationships
2. Interaction Design – layout, flow of information and feedback provided to users
3. Usability Engineering – to ensure your software behaves as users will expect
4. Visual Design – graphics, color, look, feel and visual quality and consistency
5. Human-Computer Interaction – identifying the user interface elements available for use including new Web 2.0 features

I was curious about the details and found this recent article, The Five Competencies of User Experience Design online. It describes these five UX disciplines in more detail and renames discipline (5) Prototype Engineering. I like that name because it focuses on the front end of the software development process where a little bit of prototyping can help you try out UI ideas. These days it is easy to create confusing UI with Web 2.0 or Flash frameworks and some prototyping helps avoid confusing software coming back from offshore.

Use of these UX disciplines in creating your software should be considered. It is unwise to expect your programmers to successfully engineer your user’s experience as well as your software, especially if they are offshore.

On the other hand, you can usually apply these disciplines during each iteration of development and improve your user interface over time. And some of them can be handled by your offshore team. For example, many offshore firms have graphics designers with experience to handle the Visual Design discipline.

One Accelerance client recently used an offshore team to create UI screen mock-ups in Visual Studio. The client collaborated with the offshore team on all five disciplines. When the screens were completed the team started adding the code to deliver the functionality.

Improving the user experience provided by your application can mean the difference between success and failure. Don’t be shy about asking for help. Many offshore teams will be able to tackle some or all of these five UX disciplines.

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I attended the Agile Usability session at SD West. It was presented by Mickey Phoenix and  Jeff Lopez-Stuit, both from SolutionsIQ. The central idea of their talk was how to create a superior user interface when short and quick Agile iterations budget zero time for upfront analysis of the user experience. Indeed the entire discipline of User Experience (UX) engineering does not seem to fit with rapid application development methods like Agile.

In the talk, Jeff mentioned the Ten Usability Heuristics defined by usability guru Jakob Nielsen:

1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

They are not specific recommendations for the layout of your user interface but are higher level principles to consider and abide by to create a product that is easy to use. The goal is for your user to “become one with tasks” that the software implements.

These heuristics are a valuable tool to use when reviewing the user interface of your software between development iterations and before release to your customers and users. Make sure your global software development team is aware of them as well so they can make good decisions when creating your software.

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P-CAMP Unconference for Product Managers is a free Saturday event, where participants propose their own topics, run discussions and panels, and network with peers. Accelerance is organizing a session on “How to use a global team to create your software product.”

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Steve Mezak will be speaking at IEEE Offshore Panel Discussion on the evening of March 6, 2008. The Silicon Valley IEEE Technology Management Council is hosting a panel discussion to answer your questions about managing with offshore engineers.

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