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Comment by sunir | Hacker News Reader

A related question. I'm wondering what other people do to ensure quality of outsourced code. I'm intrigued at Codacy. A lint in the cloud could solve some of my problems, but probably not all.

I'm in the position of occasionally outsourcing non-critical development but not having time myself (I used to be technical; now focused on marketing) or able to distract the dev team to look at code in depth.

Do you outsource development? How often do you code review that code? Never, once in a while, on delivery, frequently? Do you do anything else to ensure outsourced code quality?

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Hi Sunir. Great questions. Hope to get more people answering this.

Please also take a look at a parallel discussion in proggit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1zqbx1/10_ways_...

From my experience in Codacy, some of our users use it to grade and quickly send out comments from the tool to the outsourced team. They like being able to review the code as it's being done (since it's per commit) with the help of our linting code patterns.

We also give out grades which is an overall vision of the project without having to go into much technical detail. "Why is this a C?" is a great question to ask :) I'd love to hear more about your experience and your pains and check if we can be of assistance. Here's my email: jaime at codacy dot com.

My company outsources to Vietnam. At the beginning, we had time to review all the code, and we always had feedback on it. Only after several iterations would it be ok.

We would review the code manually, and later also used tools such as Jenkins and Sonar.

However, as the number of FTEs over there increased and we switched to paying per month instead of per project, the amount of the code we would received became overwhelming (about 5-6 FTEs over there per 1 FTE here), and the focus moved to getting functionality right in time.

Later we would discover horrible things in that code when we'd have to fix some issue. Which was difficult in itself because we did not know the code at all.

Very low code quality and constant issues and delays lead us to start hiring people here and slowly phase out Vietnamese programmers. We (as the local dev team) already feel much more in control of our product.

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