Answer: Experience has shown that over 50% of the software developed by offshore organizations fails to meet the expectations of the contractor. Since many of the decisions to have software developed offshore are economic decisions, the differences associated with having the software developed offshore negate the economic advantages in many cases. These offshore differences are:
Cultural differences
There may be a significant difference in the culture and values between the contractor and the offshore organization.
Communication barriers
The language of the offshore organization may be different or difficult to comprehend which causes difficulty in communicating the needs and desires of the contractor.
Loss of employee morale and support
Employees who would like to have developed the software may resent the software being developed offshore and thus make it difficult for the offshore developed software to be successful.
Root cause of the contractor IT organization not addressed
Frequently, offshoring is chosen because there are problems in the contractor organization that executives do not want to address. For example, the problems might include a lack of training for the employees in the contractor organization or other perhaps better options for software development were not explored
While the software may be developed by an outside organization, the responsibility for quality of that software cannot be contracted. The contractor is still responsible for the quality of the organization. There must be a process to monitor the development and validate the correct functioning of the software when it is developed by an outside organization.
The quality professional is the individual who should accept the quality responsibility for software developed by an outside organization. This may mean that the quality professional needs to visit periodically or during the entire developmental period of the software to ensure the quality. Many of the same practices used to assure quality of in-house developed software are applicable to software developed by outside organizations. For example, conducting reviews at specific checkpoints should occur on contracted software. Acceptance testing should be conducted on all software regardless of how developed.
The quality professional’s specific responsibility for software developed by outside organizations is to assure that the process for selecting COTS software and contracting with an outside organization for software are adequate.
One of the major responsibilities of the quality assurance activity is to oversee the development and deployment of work processes, and then to assure that those work processes are continuously improved.
Without a process for selecting COTS software and a process for contracting for software those processes would be subject to great variability. One contract may work well, one acquisition of COTS software may work well, while other acquisitions may result in a failure.
