It is a well known fact that the offshore outsourcing (or any type of outsourcing



for that matter) carries known and unknown risks. The important thing is to

find out if your offshore outsourcing provider is aware of these risks and has

a plan to either mitigate it or eliminate it altogether. The top 5 risks of

offshore outsourcing are as follows:

Requirement (Mis)understanding

Quality Risks

Data Security

Process Discipline (CMM)

Project Timeline

Requirement (Mis)understanding

Many times it happens that the requirements get written in a hurry to get the

project started as soon as possible. This is okay if the project is being done

inhouse. However if it being outsourced, it becomes a risk. If the specifications

are not written properly or are incomplete or do not have enough details, the

project will have problems on various fronts such as Project Understanding -

what needs to be done and delivered, Project Planning - putting together firm

dates for delivery, Change Controls - lots of change control will be generated

later on in the project life cycle, which could obviously delay the project

as well as increase the cost.Per the study conducted by Software Engineering

Institute, not enough understanding or the clarity around the customer requirements

is one of the top reasons on why software projects fail or get delayed.

In order to mitigate this risk, make sure that your provider has gone through

the requirement understanding phase before starting the coding phase. The requirement

understanding phase should have multiple rounds of discussion with all the parties

involved to fully understand and document their requirements in the Software

Specification Documents. This phase is independent of technology selected for

the project. For the web based projects, the provider should also prepare the

HTML mock-ups which is an excellent way to capture the application flow. [These

mock-ups should get reused during the coding phase for embedding the application

method calls.]

The first phase of any software development project must be the Requirements

Development. The objective of the Requirements Development phase is to gather

the needs of the customer and translate that into requirements specification

of what the system must do. Requirements Development consists of three related

activities:

Analyzing Requirements, which is about determining the acceptability, implement

ability, and testability.

Inspecting Requirements, which is accomplished by discussing the proposed requirement

in detail. The goal is to identify the issues and errors related to the requirements

ambiguities or discrepancies.

Gathering User Requirements, which is accomplished by interviewing the potential

users about the system they want, building the interactive prototypes, writing

the Requirement Specification documents.

The deliverable from this phase is a detailed requirements document which should

get jointly reviewed and signed off.

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