India Software Brief group on LinkedIn has a post on protection from bad software. The actions to be taken by an outsourcer (the one getting the software developed) are all necessary acceptance checks. The problem is what happens when the acceptance checks fail? Sure, reject the product but what happens to rolling out the services that depend on getting this software?
Acceptance checks can provide assurance that bad software does not get accepted. It does not provide assurance that good software will be delivered.
Far better to check the outsoursee's processes and be assured that the final acceptance checks will not turn up serious deficiencies or defects. An incremental model of development, with actual functioning code delivered would give a better estimate of the progress. This, of course, requires that the outsourcer put resources to test each increment and give feedback.
A while back I posted my views about QA and QC. The outsourcer must verify the QA processes and, by providing feedback on each increment, become part of QC. I suspect the root cause of all outsourcing horror stories lie in not doing this.
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