The Significant Barrier Between In-House Development and Outsourcing to Partner Companies
2014-01-25 11:48 (10 years ago)
ytyng
Just as I work with consideration for the families of my company’s employees, partners from collaborating companies work with consideration for the families of their employees.
Programs are not simple enough to be fully described in specifications. (Maybe 20 years ago, most things could be written into the specifications.)
When developing in-house, specifications are unnecessary. You can create things while discussing what you want to achieve.
However, this is not the case when outsourcing to a collaborating company because the contract requires following the specifications exactly.
How much cost is incurred to create the strange entity called a "specification," which records what you want to make and communicates it to others? And you can only include a fraction of what you are thinking. Above all, there are too many things you won't understand until you actually make it. Creating specifications is as complex and difficult as making the program itself, and reading them requires considerable skill as well.
No matter how much time is spent creating the specifications or developing the program, there will inevitably be unforeseen issues. Unforeseen issues cannot be prevented because they are unforeseen. This applies to both in-house development and outsourcing.
We should establish a system that quickly responds to issues, with the awareness that bugs will occur.
When outsourcing development, there's often a discussion like, "The development period is three months. We will provide support for one month after that, but any further support will be charged." This is very frightening. It should be written in-house from the beginning.
I think a good programmer is someone who can foresee many things.
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