When offshore works - a positive sample (Part 3) 📎
In one project, offshore, actually nearshore, saved not only money, but also increased the software qualitity. It was an embedded project in telematic area. We decided to implement multilayer architecture with Java. But we had also some constaints regarding the operating system and the CPU. We needed real time extensions of Linux. But we had another, bigger problem - there was no JVM available for this CPU and OS, so we had to provide a JVM implementation for the target platform. We decided to use the free, opensource kaffe implementation for this purpose. So we needed someone to do this work. From my perspective it was nearly "mission impossible" (I'm not a great C-expert). But we found a company in Poland called adescom. The specification was simple: "we need a working JVM for the target platform and real time linux". Non functional requirements: "performance should be great and resource consumption low". So we sent the spec and wait some weeks for the result. ...and it worked! I was pleasently surprised about the result's quality. I was only one time in Katowice (the polish city) to support the developers on the Java side and resolve some classloader problems. After some pair-programming like sessions and some pizzas, we resolved all problems. It was really a good experience. From my perspective this solution worked because:
- We (development team) and not management decided to outsource some work.
- The effort to define the specification was really low (actually the two sentences)
- In the nearshore-company we met real experts and not "only" developers. They were really interested in implementation of this solution and had also good ideas to improve the quality.
- The amount of communication was really low.
- It was really easy to measure the quality of the result.