Going offshore - Things to keep in mind

One of my clients decided to offshore development work. The idea is that high level, well paid work - maintaining direct contact with the customer, capturing requirements, specifying and designing the application - gets done locally while the coding gets done offshore for cheap.

This didn't quite work out as planned, for reasons that were not too difficult to anticipate. The scenario described above touches on a number of issues that I would like to address in a series of blogs.

The anticipated subjects:

• "High level work" - What separates high level from low level work? Why is high level (= high cost) work not offshored as well?
  
• Separation of architecture and development - Does this provide benefits? Improve quality?
  
• Going offshore to reduce development cost - How much cheaper is offshore labor really? What additonal costs are incurred?
  
• "Coding" - Is there a job called "coding"? What does it consist off? What happens to the onshore "coders"?
  
• Ethical aspects - What are the implications of producing offshore in low wage areas of the world and selling the product in high price markets? What does it mean to the current workforce?
• Prerequisites - What kind of projects are suitable for offshoring? What processes should be in place before going offshore is attempted?
  
• Economical aspects - Are there other, better ways to reduce development cost? What does "better" mean in this context?

What does that have to do with Software Entropy? Software quality gets influenced by many factors, and the longer I work in the field the more I recognize that most problems in software development aren't technical. Management decisions have a huge impact, and going offshore is one of them.