Off-shore developers

Off-shore developers 2007

The U .S . has been seeing a current trend of its companies outsourcing IT initiatives overseas to save costs . This is partly is attributable to the low cost of labor abroad . The article discounts the wisdom of making a blanket endorsement for outsourcing programming overseas

The author ‘s premise is that he was a bit rash in his earlier presumption that offshore coders are more capable than U .S . coders . The adoption of the capability presumption has its effect in the calculations behind many offshore outsourcing decisions

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author had come to the earlier conclusion based on the findings from a panel of software security experts who asserted that programmers in India do better work than their U .S . counterparts . He goes ahead to provide anecdotes on work done by programmers in India touching on faulty error processing practices , issues with referential integrity and difficulties experienced when having to make code changes (Coffee 2004

Beyond such anecdotes , there is also evidence based on joint research work by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Harvard , the University of Pittsburgh and Hewlett- Packard . The research of a sample of 100 projects coded by developers provides defects rates in the U .S Europe and other countries , India and Japan . Defect rate refers to errors found in the first year of use per thousand lines of source code It was found that while the worldwide average is 3 percent (that is three defects per 100 ,000 lines , Europe and other countries had the highest defect rate of 5 percent , followed by India at 3 .3 percent . The U .S . coders fared better than their counterparts from India with a 3 percent defect rate and the Japan led the pack at a mere 0 .5 percent defect rate

In an article by Marianne McGee , Gallo CIO , Kushar predicts a reduction in offshoring cost savings as countries like India try to keep up with latest technologies thereby giving U .S . workers the edge in technology and business know-how (McGee , 2006

Other factors playing into cost of offshoring (not mentioned in Coffee ‘s article ) include the fact that some programming , such as for Business Intelligence , requires local business knowledge (Consilvio , 2003 References

Consilvio , Jean (2003 . BI : Last to Leave . Computerworld , 37 (51 , 40

McGee , Marianne Kolbasuk (2006 . You Vs . Offshoring — U .S . tech pros are surprisingly upbeat , and pay is on the rise . But the job outlook is anything but warm and fuzzy . InformationWeek , 1086

Coffee ,

(2004 . Offshore Coding Myth Setting the record straight on programming quality . eWeek , 21 (18 , 60 . Retrieved January 28 , 2007 , from Research Library database (Document ID : 1… [banner_entry_footer]