#on-shoring

radtac:craft is a provider of software development services and I recently looked at this area as part of our market scanning exercise. The use of agile, lean and other modern methods to deliver fastest value is directly related to this area. As part of that review I set up a debate on the CIO Network to get opinion from peers and colleagues on off-shore versus on-shore (http://linkd.in/VDv4kj ). Take a look at the results, I was certainly surprised at how the results turned out. Hopefully the question was open and not too biased, feel free to add your vote, it is still an open poll.

There is a perceived wisdom that off-shore is best for development and testing because of cost and also access to high quality teams. This may be because there are strong histories of excellent technical tertiary education and a significant level of competition to succeed in the largest of these markets, India (http://bit.ly/VDwX0C ). For me I think that this highlights questions and issues around; the maturity of the software development market, the inherent skills for software development, how our different cultures take on newer engineering practices as much as it says about the “quality and supply” and “cost and value”.

For me it is a bigger debate around where software development sits in the perception of executives in a business, why does their business need software, what they think that software is and how will it deliver value for the business or is it just a cost of doing business. So a key fundamental is you cannot easily outsource what you don’t understand in terms of need and shape, this is a challenge in some of these traditional outsourcing markets, let alone the originating customer / product owner.

This is a useful article that covers some broad research into the market, it takes an American bias and, with that in mind, has excellent relevance in wider global markets such as Europe.

http://www.bhmi.com/onshoring_vs_offshoring.html

I will be providing a more in-depth look at reasons why this software development ‘re-shoring’ may be happening in a longer blog article next week.

Michael Short - COO radtac Ltd