Saturday, January 28, 2006

Offshoring Software - a Developer's Opinion

A brief scan of Google's Blog Search looking for other blogs on software development and I happened upon a post by a Rockford Lhotka about how software is too hard, and that the developers have brought offshoring down on themselves because they are always re-inventing things that already work well enough for the business purposes.

Well, I have an opinion about that (qu'elle suprise)

Offshoring is driven almost totally by costs. Companies look at what it costs to develop software, and it's significantly cheaper to do it offshore in India (or sometimes China), because of the much lower cost of living over there. The additional expenses of getting a reliable development center set up, sending managers over there to hire and spin up the offshore team, and communicate are smaller than the saving on salaries and benefits. So the company have a lower total cost to develop, and that looks good to them.

There are 2 flies in this profitable ointment, however: the offshoring boom is driving Indian developer salaries up fast; and dealing with a remote team from a different culture, with significant communication barriers, makes it difficult to develop good software.

Let's take a quick look at the first point - salaries. Indian cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai (formerly Madras) all compete for the local developers. The boom has brought many US companies to the country, where they have lots of jobs to fill. So they offer better salaries to attract people. Then the next big company arrives, and has to offer bigger salaries to draw people their way. Sure, there's a long way to go before they cost as much as Americans, but they are cutting into the "big savings" with every raise. A corollary to this is turnover - as salaries rise in Bangalore, the Hyderabad developers see a chance to better their lot by finding a job over there; 2 months later, Chennai salaries create envy in Bangalore developers.

Now for the second point - developing with a remote team. I often find it ironic that American managers who won't let their staff telecommute "because if I can't see them, how do I know they're working?" are willing to create an entire department half a world away where they will meet face-to-face no more then once a month at best. Indians in software all speak English fairly well, in theory. But quite often the combination of accent and speech patterns conspire to make them difficult for Americans to understand, particularly over the phone. This make collaboration less efficient, and truly harder to resolve misunderstandings.

The time difference is another factor. If the finishing touches to a product must be made in the US, the Indian team will need to have finished them the previous workday, meaning 36 hours ago, to allow for their changes to percolate through most CMS systems. Even if your CMS system can take changes rapidly, the 10.5 hour time difference means that the morning is spent pulling in the India work and rebuild the application, which for local development could have been done in the overnight hours. And if there are bugs, the Indian team has gone home for the night, making it harder to get their input to fix things. So the Indian team has a deadline that may be 2 days earlier than the local team.

Another issue is the development culture. American developers, especially after the dot-com boom, are wont to question everything about a design. While this can be very frustrating for the designers, it does tend to flush out any problems with the design, the design documents, and sometimes even with the project itself. I have found a fair number of errors in the documentation of a design by questionsing the intent. From anecdotal evidence, significant numbers of Indian developers do not question such things, for whatever reason, leading to incorrect software. It may be that they see the inconsistency, but do not feel comfortable bringing it to the attention of the designer, or that they assume that the designer intends it for a reason, but does not explicitly state the reason. Whatever the cause, it does not further the project. Add to this the reluctance the remote team may have for reporting difficulties they are having back to the home office - few people like to report bad news, and the cultural divide makes this reluctance greater.

A large proportion of Indian developers have come out of longer academic careers than typical for American developers. This is problem in a production environment, regardless of the location of the developer, because the rules of software development in academia are quite different than in business. Many former academic programmers have difficulty transitioning to an environment where the projects are usually quite detailed on how it looks, and less detailed on how it works, yet requiring high-perfomance output. I've seen fresh-out developers struggle over what to name database columns, because their boss did not give them a detailed naming plan. Other common academically-induced quirks are oddball variable naming schemes (sports teams, etc), and a really rigid view of commenting style.

[I hasten to add here, that I'm not in the least saying that Indian developers are not smart, or capable of developing killer software, but rather that in the context of developing software as part of an American company, they have some hurdles to reaching peak performance, most of which are purely part of the distance and differences in language and culture. Such issues arise between American and European development teams, as well, but the greater commonality of history makes the cultural issues a little less complex.]

And another thing - one of the key issues with a remote team is being able to provide them with good documentation - requirements, architecture, design, and so forth. Many (most?) American development shops, frankly, suck at development documentation. So, no matter how great the Indian team may be, they may not have any chance of developing the desired product because they don't know features to develop!

Part 2 of this will address the other side of Rockford's rant - that developers spend too much time fiddling with the internals of software and not enough time working on business value.



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