Yourdon, in "The Death and Decline of the American Programmer", the textbook whose success marked his descent, listed offshore development as one of those factors in the decline of the American programmer. Some work can be successfully sent offshore, but there are issues to consider. I should provide the disclaimer that CGI acquired IMR Global last August. CGI already located work in Canada, and IMR Global has been developing in India for some time. However, my comments are my own, and should in no way be taken to reflect any company's position. The one word in Raghu. Rao's post the compelled me to reply was "quality", from "if they can get the work done in shorter time with better quality". I think that you can actually subtract that word from the equation, and the equation still holds: What will it cost, and when can I have it? Too many managers would not know quality if they could see it. Worse, I doubt we could even begin to agree on what quality means in this context. Will an offshore shop adhere to your shop's standards? Can you define your shop's standards? What about the resulting documentation, in the form of separate documents, and in the form of comments within the code? Will an offshore company understand the practices of your industry? Before CGI bought this office, we were ISI Systems, Inc., and specialized in the peculiarities of Massachusetts insurance regulations. Some of our employees have been associated with the state regulatory agencies, and bring a distinctive perspective to those lines of business. Can you provide correct and complete specifications for the work to be done by the offshore company? Will management know the difference before it is too late? Someone recently posted an article on the psychology of unexpected failure or something like that, where people failed because they lacked the knowledge to succeed, but lacking that knowledge, they did not know that they were doomed to failure. If the decision makers cannot distinguish between what makes for success and its absence, then success is a random occurrence, and they may as well consult the planets and constellations as their project plans and status reports. OTOH, Y2K is exactly the sort of thing that can be outsourced: labor and analysis intensive tasks that are well-defined and readily understood, where any costs saved achieve an economy of scale. One real benefit of offshore development is that work that is too massive to be undertaken at the prevailing cost per line of code becomes feasible, when that cost can be slashed. Some pervasive artifact of times long past can be cleaned out of the code, instead of being tolerated, because it becomes affordable to do so. The trick is knowing the difference, and making sure that those difference are understood and respected. These waters are fraught with perils, especially for those most inclined toward them. Greg Stigers http://www.cgiusa.com * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, * * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *