The Retrospector

In today’s competitive software development world, companies are experimenting with many scenarios to reduce the cost of their software. Some companies prefer to develop everything in-house. Others prefer to outsource everything. With both options being rather expensive as professionals aren’t exactly the most affordable, some companies are considering outsourcing to companies abroad.

Offshore outsourcing has been proven to succeed for some companies, but it isn’t the alternative choice for everyone. One alternative with many similarities is to use college students as a workforce for the same elements you would consider off-shoring. I’m sure there are some companies that have found the off-shoring business model suits them perfectly. I say “good for them” if they got it to work out the way they wanted.

I have to admit that I’ve only been involved with one major project that involved an offshore development team and the entire experience was horrible. I can’t say much for how it works now (a few years later), but I imagine things have probably gotten better. What I am interested in pointing out is an environment I’ve seen work very successfully with many similarities.

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I stumbled onto an article in Ry Lowry’s blog that included a piece about his frustration with applying test driven development (TDD) to a commercial framework.

To summarize, he’s comparing TDD applied to an open source framework (Spring) with applying it to the commercial product. Spring was certainly designed for TDD and being in the open source community is very easily integrated with near any of the popular testing methods.

The commercial product he’s using doesn’t seem to have any easy way to be tested using many of the testing tools that are out there from a TDD perspective where you start with unit tests and work your way up to the different testing levels until you have near-end-user-like testing as well.

A couple of things come to mind that I think add value to the discussion:

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