Search:

Offshore Software Development

It is a well known fact that the offshore outsourcing (or any type of outsourcing
for that matter) carries known and unknown risks. The important thing is to
find out if your offshore outsourcing provider is aware of these risks and has
a plan to either mitigate it or eliminate it altogether. The top 5 risks of
offshore outsourcing are as follows:

Requirement (Mis)understanding

Quality Risks

Data Security

Process Discipline (CMM)

Project Timeline

Requirement (Mis)understanding

Many times it happens that the requirements get written in a hurry to get the
project started as soon as possible. This is okay if the project is being done
inhouse. However if it being outsourced, it becomes a risk. If the specifications
are not written properly or are incomplete or do not have enough details, the
project will have problems on various fronts such as Project Understanding -
what needs to be done and delivered, Project Planning - putting together firm
dates for delivery, Change Controls - lots of change control will be generated
later on in the project life cycle, which could obviously delay the project
as well as increase the cost.Per the study conducted by Software Engineering
Institute, not enough understanding or the clarity around the customer requirements
is one of the top reasons on why software projects fail or get delayed.

In order to mitigate this risk, make sure that your provider has gone through
the requirement understanding phase before starting the coding phase. The requirement
understanding phase should have multiple rounds of discussion with all the parties
involved to fully understand and document their requirements in the Software
Specification Documents. This phase is independent of technology selected for
the project. For the web based projects, the provider should also prepare the
HTML mock-ups which is an excellent way to capture the application flow. [These
mock-ups should get reused during the coding phase for embedding the application
method calls.]

The first phase of any software development project must be the Requirements
Development. The objective of the Requirements Development phase is to gather
the needs of the customer and translate that into requirements specification
of what the system must do. Requirements Development consists of three related
activities:

Analyzing Requirements, which is about determining the acceptability, implement
ability, and testability.

Inspecting Requirements, which is accomplished by discussing the proposed requirement
in detail. The goal is to identify the issues and errors related to the requirements
ambiguities or discrepancies.

Gathering User Requirements, which is accomplished by interviewing the potential
users about the system they want, building the interactive prototypes, writing
the Requirement Specification documents.

The deliverable from this phase is a detailed requirements document which should
get jointly reviewed and signed off.

We invite you to visit our .NET center of excellence and offshore outsourcing blog

To find out more about how Hanu Software can help you grow your business,
give us a call at 6099452242 or visit our web site www.hanusoftware.com