Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Frankly they’re doomed to failure because someone decided to save money by outsourcing overseas. I’ve worked on several projects that dealt with outsourced code and each one was a borderline complete failure until an on-shore developer cleaned it up. I’m sitting here looking at code created for my client and it’s a complete mess.

That brings me to a correlation I never thought possible. If you take code created in India that was an outsourced project the results of this may be a working project on the outside. However, the moment you start getting into the guts of the application it’s the same quality as if you threw three fourteen year old teens into a room that ‘think’ they’re awesome programmers, give them one reference book to share, and provide free liquor to them through the whole project. Some of it is good (the simple aspects), some is a complete mess, no standards, no documentation, no structure, repeated code everywhere, and the spelling of English words and phrases is ridiculous. That reminds me the word ‘please’ has an ‘l’ in it. I’m so tired of having to correct spelling on output message from “Pease” to “Please.”

For those of you who consider outsourcing keep this point in mind when deciding how much you really want to have to rework. I’ve been working on this project for three days, consolidated about 15 pages into a base page class, consolidated five master pages into one with a new custom user navigation control (only difference between them all was menu options), and have had to actually put exception handling into this project. From the time stamps, and fixed copyright dates I know that this project took from 2004 until 2008. Pathetic software development turn around for such a small project. The backend was developed on LLBL Gen Pro with a custom front web application UI, and let me tell you everything on the UI side almost nearly has to be rewritten. This isn’t unique, I wish it was, but I’m just saying I hate the quality of code brought back from overseas.

If you think you’re saving time by having developers overseas who can develop while you’re asleep so you think you get more done, or the costs justify the move just think twice. You may complete the project on time and under budget but the project will be so unstable you’ll just end up eating the costs of poor judgment based on fiscal desires, heck look at Microsoft’s initial launch of the Xbox 360. Cheap material (or code) equals freaking expensive rework costs.