Anatomy of a Project Failure: Corporate Culture and Lessons Learned

blog.mikedesjardins.us

9 points·mosburger··2 comments

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?

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.

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