The traditional focus of outsourcing has been on cost reduction of local resources in order to stay competitive in the global market.  Product quality, however, remains an on-going challenge for companies who are looking for consistency, maintainability and ownership of the final output.  Compared to traditional manufacturing industries the software industry bears substantially higher risks in managing the quality of software applications developed by offshore providers.  The difficulty stems from the fact that software development is a dynamic process by nature.  It is largely driven by business needs and customer requirements which can often change over the development lifecycle.  With a lack of well-defined process or appropriate tooling to monitor process enactment, companies often face quality control issues even in successful engagements where products are delivered as required and on-time.  For example:

• Reliability: How is the application developed throughout the development process?  Are there enough work products produced in the process to measure the soundness of the underlying design and code efficiency?
• Maintainability: Our company has developed internal guidance, templates and best practices over the years to achieve consistency in quality.  How can we maintain and support applications developed by outsourced resources with foreign standards, and build on top of these applications for future enhancements?
• Flexibility: How easily can we move the project in-house, or transfer knowledge to a third-party vendor for continuous development?
• Repeatability: Can the provider deliver consistently at the same quality level, given another development project of different scale and/or requirements?

In recent years, companies are broadening the scope of their global outsourcing strategy.  Looking beyond the one-time, cost-based decision to move offshore, there is an increasing emphasis on process methodologies when evaluating the outsourcing provider’s maturity in their development practices. 

“Multishoring” is also increasingly taking place in the industry.  Rather than giving the whole offshore development project to a single offshore team, companies are shifting their strategies to employ a combination of internal resources and multiple offshore development teams for a development project.  This allows them to take advantage of in-house expertise while lowering the risks of relying on a single provider to determine the success or failure of a project.  Successful multishoring requires a standard process to be followed by multiple offshore teams to deliver consistent outputs. 

With a process-centric outsourcing approach and qualified resources in place, companies can benefit from a mixture of talents and services at a lower cost, and a flexible force that can scale to changing business needs.