Excerpt from Chapter 7: Software Outsourcing Metrics

You can observe a lot just by watching. - Yogi Berra

How do you measure the success of your outsourcing? There are several ways to look at it. First, if you are a technical professional -a VP of engineering or a programmer or project manager responsible for outsourcing-one way you can measure your success is your ability to communicate with the offshore team. Your “gut feel” for how things are going is based on the quality of the software you are receiving, the kinds of bugs being found in it, and how many crises must be fixed via conference calls.

If you are more comfortable running your business with quantifiable objectives, a gut feel is not enough. That is where metrics come in. They give you a way of quantifying the results of your outsourcing so you can judge objectively whether your software development is succeeding or not. Better yet, they let you focus on ways to improve the productivity of your outsourcing for greater cost savings.

Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” And he is correct. However, in small organizations, metrics may seem like overkill. If your offshore team meets its commitment to deliver the software on time, and the code contains a reasonably small number of bugs that get fixed quickly, then what is the problem? Do you really need to spend time inventing formulas, adding up lines of code, and dividing by man-hours? After all, you may not bother with fancy metrics when your programmers are right there in the same room with you.

Stroke, Stroke!

When I worked as a programmer in the 1980s, my boss used to joke that he was going to hire a guy with a kettle drum and put him in the corner of the room. Every time the kettle drum was hit, we had to have written a line of code!

Today there is a different drumbeat. Now that outsourcing is more popular and promises huge cost savings, the drumbeat drives executives to measure the real savings. They want to be sure that outsourcing of software development is as cost-effective as it can possibly be.