What factors should you consider in making your decision? when are the risks of outsourcing too great to bear? If you do decide to outsource, how should you do it? Should you contract with an offshore vendor or one in your home country? Or should you use more than one vendor?

More than 80 percent of outsourcing is done in India. But is that the best place for you? Outsourcing to China is growing rapidly. Is that the right destination for your outsourcing? What about Eastern Europe or Latin America?

What criteria should you take into consideration when selecting your outsourcing vendor? Just having a personal referral to a vendor from a friend or relative is usually not enough. The vendor you choose should meet the business, technical, and time zone criteria that work well for your organization.

You can save even more money when you create an offshore subsidiary, because the salary you pay your offshore engineers is lower than the outsourcing rate. But what about the setup costs and management overhead? See if it would make sense for your company to use a partner to build, operate, and then transfer (BOT) your offshore engineering team into your own subsidiary later.

It is critical for you to have a specification for your software that explains what it should do. Yet you don't need to spend months creating a huge document that rivals the size of War and Peace in order to direct your outsourcing effectively. This chapter describes how big your specification should be and what it should contain.

Will your internal engineers be working from the same code base as your outsourced team? How will you handle integration if they are working separately? What are agile software development methods, and when should you be using them, whether you are outsourcing or not? How will you be able to keep in touch with your outsourcing vendor? What tools, in addition to email and instant messaging, can you use to collaborate and to control their work?

How will you measure the performance of your outsourced team? What levels of productivity should you expect? Should you measure your results differently for new development than for maintenance programming?

Are there countries you should avoid? What needs to be in your contract to give you the legal protection you need? Besides a contract, what else do you need to protect your intellectual property?

Maybe you should start outsourcing with this often neglected part of software development. Do you have a robust QA process in place? Will affordable testing and QA increase the value of your software and company?

Some companies outsource all software development, and others are more picky. What should you look for in a software project to make it a prime candidate for outsourcing?

Is outsourcing a fad, a flash in the pan? Is globalization good or bad? What can you do to protect your career and thrive if outsourcing continues to grow in popularity?