[smugma]

We have a tool that was built by a third party. They did an excellent job but for various reasons we needed to change vendors. I didn’t hire the old or new dev teams, so it wasn’t my role to tell them how to come up to speed. Early on they said they wanted to redo all the test cases, which seemed off to me (it’s too abstract, and why redo test cases for parts of the code that are unlikely to be modified). I said something but didn’t push it.

Someone on my team has been giving the dev team demos of the functionality and thinking behind the product a few days a week. My one request at the beginning was that they should learn enough about the product to be able to give a demo back to us. It took them about 2-3 weeks (maybe 8 45 min overview sessions from my team, which owns the product requirements), but it showed that they know what it is the tool is supposed to do.

They spent another 3 weeks “getting comfortable” (6 weeks from start) they finally felt comfortable to start implementing small features and bug fixes. I’d have preferred that they start fixing bugs right away (it might take 2-3 weeks to fix the first bug because they need to figure out how to get access to systems, documentation, deployment, etc.) because it’s more tangible, but I know I’m impatient and let them do it this way. It seems to work ok so far but will be another month or so before I can decide whether or not they are actually competent. I guess the good news for them is they (team of 10 in Eastern Europe) aren’t being bugged by the client, and if they actually are good, should be enjoying the freedom to do things their way and implement their own processes.