Form and Quality Control of Software Outsourcing

In general, I divide software outsourcing into three forms. The first form is the establishment of new R & D centers in low-cost countries such as China. Although the R & D center is known as a branch of the headquarters, its R & D work is generally not highly sophisticated. Obviously, because the configured branches fully adopt the headquarters in the corporate system and corporate culture, this outsourcing form can fully match the company's quality control in terms of software quality control. As you can imagine, the cost of outsourcing is quite high.
Personnel Outsourcing is the second form of software outsourcing. That is to say, the outsourcers of outsourcing companies are involved in the project of contract companies (that is, companies that employ outsourcing companies), except for the salaries of outsourcing personnel, the participation of outsourced personnel in software projects is no different from that of formal employees of contract companies. From the perspective of the Contract Company, the quality control in this form is no different from the first form mentioned above and can be consistent with the quality control level of the company. The advantage of a contract company adopting this outsourcing form is that once the company wants to lay off employees, it can choose to terminate the contract with the outsourcing company, without the need to pay additional layoff fees. From the perspective of outsourcing companies, the advantage of this form is that personnel management is relatively simple, but the explicit profit is lower than the third form.
The third form of software outsourcing is Project outsourcing. That is to say, a contract company transfers a software project to an outsourcing company for development. This outsourcing form is the most prone to problems in quality control. In this form of outsourcing, the cost paid by the contract company is not calculated by people as in Form 2, but is paid one by one based on the development time required by the project. Therefore, the first problem facing this method is how to estimate the project development time reasonably. For the benefit, outsourcing companies tend to estimate the workload, while contract companies try to compress the workload. In this form, because the quality control of the project is completely undertaken by outsourcing companies, it is difficult for contract companies to obtain high-quality software products without technical and management constraints, in the process of operation, it is also relatively easy to get involved, thus affecting the development efficiency. From the perspective of outsourcing companies, this form of explicit profit is higher, but due to the large cost of project management, I suspect that this form of final profit is not as good as the second form of outsourcing.
It should be said that I have gone through these three outsourcing forms during my work at Motorola. It also witnessed that more than a dozen outsourcing projects (third form) in a large project finally all ended in failure, and the contractor was a well-known Indian company through cm5. In stark contrast, the second outsourcing mode was very successful at Motorola. This article is from Li Yun's blog and must be kept at: http://blog.csdn.net/hzliyun/article/details/7840985.