Maybe outsourcing QA isn't such a good idea after all.

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.

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.

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?

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

I would find it funny that they were outsourcing ANYTHING.

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.

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.

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.

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

rofl [edit: I've been there]

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.

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?'