Traditionally outsourcing and especially offshore outsourcing dealt with work that was typically *not* mission critical. In recent times, this trend is changing rapidly. ISVs and other companies (whose core business is not IT) are increasingly using offshore development centers as their primary workplace to build new products and applications.

While offshoring development of mission critical products, several risks need to be addressed –

Risks in intellectual property ownership
Risk arising due to perceived loss of control
Geo-political risks
Inadequate quality and missing market deadlines (Perhaps the most prominent risk)

This series of articles focuses on how to turn the risk of "Inadequate quality and missing market deadlines" into a successful opportunity. This is not a 30,000 feet view of outsourcing, but a peek at winning ground level techniques.

Before identifying the techniques, a company needs to be able to measure whether their foray into software offshoring is yielding benefits beyond cost benefits. The 3 key questions to ask are:

Has the pace of product rollout improved or declined? Offshoring introduces management overheads, time zone constraints and related overheads. If this is not effectively dealt with, the risk of delayed response time and slower release cycles get amplified.
Did the move to offshore improve quality? Product releases are characterized by aggressive timelines. In the process, the fastest implementation approach is chosen, but did it result in consistent, improved quality or did the customers face drop in quality with subsequent release?
Has the maintainability of the product improved? Product managers are well aware that unless a culture of quality sets in, the product could work functionally but maybe messier for handling bug fixes or future enhancements. Code quality, code readability and architectural consistency are key parameters to assess here.

Each of the techniques discussed in this series of articles effectively addresses one or more of the questions above. These techniques have evolved from practical experience and may need to be adopted by both the outsourcer and the offshore partner.

We'll be continuing this series next week with the first 2 techniques; it's only a short wait away!

If you'd like to learn more about how we can help you with offshore software development, for either software products or service applications, please contact us at http://www.trigent.com.