Outsourcing Perl programming

[Smylers]

Pete Sergeant writes:

> Nightly code review, and assesment. I'm hoping it'll take me a small
> amount of time to review tests and documentation, compared to writing
> them myself. I may be wrong, but it's worth trying...

Ffrom my one experience of working with outsourced development[*0] the
time spent looking at what they'd produced and writing e-mails
explaining ways in which was unsatisfactory was similar to the amount of
time it would have taken us to write the project ourselves[*1].

Spotting a defect may not take long, but the problem is then explaining
why it's a problem, adding it to the list of things to check next time,
checking it again, and so on.  The explaining can lead to a long-ish
thread discussing it in more detail, especially if the programmer claims
there isn't a way of solving the problem, at which point to disprove him
you can end up outlining the solution or writing code samples -- which I
found far, far more stressful than just developing it myself.

It was a sufficiently unpleasant experience that I would almost
certainly refuse any future 'opportunity' to work with outsourced
developers.

Smylers

  [*0]  Our client had got some Russians to do the development; we were
  supposed to check it and deploy it.   Actually I'm not sure we were
  _asked_ to do the checking, rather that it coming about while trying,
  and failing, to deploy it.

  [*1]  Possibly even more, given that the project was abandoned before
  completion; we don't actually know that an infinite amount of
  rejecting the code would have eventually produced something good
  enough.