

Maybe outsourcing QA isn't such a good idea after all. - jtchang
http://skeptek.com/2010/08/31/heres-another-one-for-the-outsourcing-horror-story-collection/
Does anyone have any comments on outsourcing QA?
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hyung
I'm an US ex-pat living and working in a developing country, and I see this
situation all the time. For the first couple years, I would lose my mind when
it happened. Then I realized that it's not an intelligence or skill thing;
it's a cultural and communication thing.

\- A friend of mine here once hired a guy to paint his ceiling. The painter
did a good job on the ceiling, but didn't put down tarps and got paint
everywhere on the walls and floor. My friend was understandably angry, but the
painter couldn't understand what the problem was. From the painter's point of
view, my friend didn't specify that the floor and walls not get paint on them.

\- I hired a crew to build an addition to our office. After they put in the
floor, I realized that it was lumpy and misshapen. When I confronted them
about it, they didn't consider it a problem. I didn't say the floor needed to
be flat.

\- I asked a smart, college-educated colleague to fix one of our broken
clocks. She ended up just switching the clock with one of the working clocks.
I had to go back and specify that all clocks need to work.

If you're going to outsource, you absolutely need someone who can bridge this
gap. What feels half-ass and unacceptable under any circumstances to you and
me, could just be normal and expected for a lot of people. And similarly, what
feels normal and acceptable to us can feel obnoxiously strict and overbearing
for others.

The trick is to understand that for any given situation, the meaning of
"acceptable" varies from culture to culture. And it has nothing to do with
skill or intelligence.

~~~
tomotomo
Hyung, are you in Vietnam? :)

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trotsky
_Matthew/Chicago:_ Srini did you skip everything that was not working and just
mark it passed?

 _Srinivasanu/India:_ Yes Matt

Overseas QA: Same results as domestic, now with 70% more honesty.

~~~
tylerarnold
I completely agree. You can find trusting people overseas... It all comes from
building a relationship.

Granted, being 5,000 miles away (and not having face to face contact) can
hamper that process, but there are plenty of trusting and responsible
"outsourced" individuals that can handle quality control jobs.

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FrancescoRizzi
I am not sure that it is completely honest to label this as a horror story
about 'outsourcing' per-se. I take it as a horror story about lack of skills,
unprofessionalism, and mismanagement. After all, who picked the QA team?

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mr_luc
Out of curiousity -- is 'UAW' United Auto Workers?

I would find it funny that they were outsourcing ANYTHING.

~~~
jbooth
Sounded like a manufacturing system -- probably Ford/GM's call, not UAW's.

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devmonk
Used to work at a place that tried outsourcing QA. Truly awful idea. They
started off by just trying to get them to document the process they would be
using to QA. They failed.

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nhashem
I saw a lot of this at two of the web companies I worked in the mid-2000s.
Outsourcing/offshoring was all the rage and it was tempting for a mid-sized
web company to think, "you know, our processes are starting to break down now
that releasing buggy code causes a lot more problems, but it's going to take
months to build a QA team... let's offshore it!"

It's not trivial. If your software development process can be described as,
"some business guy writes an e-mail with four sentences and a developer works
with him to implement the feature" or "production and dev environments are
never in sync, but devs double as sysadmins and have access to production so
they just modify configuration as necessary," then offshoring/outsourcing QA
is doomed to fail. You need things like detailed specs and a consistent QA
environment. I had projects that took 4 days to develop but 2 months to QA
because every "bug" was either a) actually an intended feature or b) some
inconsistency with my dev and their QA environment. Throw in a time difference
causing a 10 minute hallway conversation now taking 2 weeks over e-mail, and
very often a language barrier, and there is no other possible outcome except
for an unmitigated disaster.

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smiler
Personally, if I am presenting to clients, I always check everything I'm going
to show beforehand - I run through what I'll be demo'ing and check that it
works as expected. I'm not sure why Matt didn't do that, but there you go.

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kranner
'Matt' doesn't sound like a very pleasant guy to work with, outsourcing aside.

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danbmil99
rofl [edit: I've been there]

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madaxe
The fundamental is that you can't outsource skilled knowledge labour
piecemeal. You either outsource _everything_ , and provide a third party with
a functional specification, timings, and the financial means to fulfil those
two, or you are, as they say, fucked. If you attempt to outsource individual
components of a project to multiple physical locations in disparate timezones,
you'll inevitably have a communications disconnect, and shit will hit fans.
Developers need to talk to users need to talk to QA need to talk to
management. Keep the lines open and clear, and everything goes smooth as a
greased-up polecat in a cement mixer. Fail to do so, and everything suffers.

In this scenario, it'd seem that the poor bastards in Uttar Pradesh or
wherever-the-fuck don't have a clue as to what's going on. If they did, they'd
probably do a halfway competent job. I've worked with QA teams in India and
China in the past, and it's been an excellent experience - because we
_communicated_ with them non-stop. It would have been preferable to keep those
elements on-site, however the parent company of the client we worked with were
insistent that we utilise their resources - and because they managed them
well, the arrangement was tenable.

Anyway. Don't blame the outsourcee - blame yourself for either making a shitty
decision or mismanaging the resources you've acquired.

~~~
gabea
I total agree with your assessment. Management sometimes believes that you can
outsource software development and quality assurance without investing the
time in documenting what it is you are sending out. They then wonder why
things are missed.

Additionally what happens is that the person sending out the work is often
stuck having to fix it due to a crunch in time, thus defeating the purpose of
outsourcing. (At least in my experience)

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recoiledsnake
Title is overgeneralizing. A lot depends on how teams and communication are
set up.

I have had success in outsourcing QA. The key is to either have people onshore
who can communicate with them over phones or someone offshore who is a good
communicator and have him/her explain things in person.

>Matthew/Chicago: I think I’m in the Twilight Zone.

Can't 'Matt' fathom that his message might be confusing to a non-native
speaker? Couldn't he have put it in plain words before just firing someone
over IM in a rage?

There is a proper way to 'let go' of people even if you think they are morons.
Maybe it was a show-off to the '20 very concerned UAW workers' in the room?

'Hey, looks like we failed at outsourcing properly, but I just fired the guy
responsible for this mess. That should make it okay, right?'

~~~
tlack
After the guy admits that he simply ignored failed tests and marked the QA as
passed, I think the time for kind and easy to understand communication is long
past.

~~~
CamperBob
It looked to me like he just misunderstood the question. He shouldn't be
answering "Yes" when he doesn't understand, of course, but I don't think he
was admitting to fraud or dishonesty.

~~~
tjogin
Did you miss how the conversation started? They were talking over the
internet, and she wanted him to see if his internet connection was working.

~~~
CamperBob
Yes. That's one of the reasons I don't think this person had anything to do
with defrauding the client by falsifying or skipping tests. They're not even
smart (or English-literate) enough to lie about it.

