

 Anatomy of a Project Failure: Corporate Culture and Lessons Learned - mosburger
http://blog.mikedesjardins.us/2008/03/anatomy-of-project-failure-corporate.html

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projectileboy
I thought this was great. I'd like to echo one of his questions to this
community - what are the ways in which you have successfully worked with teams
in India? Our QA engineers are great, but the time difference and the lack of
domain knowledge caused by rapid turnover is making it impossible for us to
capitalize on their abilities. Any advice?

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mosburger
Hey - I'm the article author. :) And we did have _some_ successes working w/
the Indian team, but they were with very specialized, specific components of
the application that could be easily spec'd out.

For example, we had to write a daemon that would interface with a national
wireless carrier's network to provision new services using XML requests over
sockets. The XML had a DTD and examples of requests and responses. We had one
engineer in the U.S. writing the specs and doing some development (he split
his time with other projects), one QA person in the U.S., and two to three
developers in India. That project went a _lot_ more smoothly, because

\- There wasn't a lot of domain knowledge required.

\- The Specs were well documented.

\- The team working on the project was small.

So I think it's critically important to pick which projects are outsourced
very carefully.

