Re: Reversal of the outsourcing trend?

[Peter Neilson <neilson -at- alltel -dot- net>]

Don't pick on just India.

Saw the same thing happen twenty years ago with
software development outsourced to England.  The
problem was certainly not language.  Instead it
a major problem of communications.  The English
side of the project was finished and signed off
before a tech writer in the US discovered blocking
bugs that should have been found at the review of the
Requirement Specification.  At that company, the
technical writing staff were the *only* effective
quality-assurance department.  The tech writer
never saw a requirement spec.  Was there one?

The consensus of engineering and marketing management
was that there were no bugs, the project having been
completed.  The consensus of the customers was that
there was no product.

At the same company some of the products were
developed and *documented* in England.  The resulting
docs were "professional" from an academic point of
view.  They were thorough and dense, avoided slang,
and made effective use of the passive voice.  Excuse
me: "They were written to be thorough and dense, they
were constructed to avoid any hint of nonstandard
English, and their writing style was carefully chosen
to make full use of the passive forms of the verb that
are to be found in the repertoire of any skilled
writer."  They were also unusable.

Development and documentation were henceforth done
mostly in the US.

Brian Gordon wrote: