[mumblemumble]

Moreover, this is exactly the frustration I've experienced when working with outsourced developers.

Which tells me the problem may be fundamental, not a technical one. It's not just a matter of needing "more intelligence". I don't question the intelligence or skill of the people on the outsourced team I was working with. The problem was simple communication. They didn't really know or understand our business and its goals well enough to anticipate all sorts of little things, and the lack of constant social interaction of the type you typically get when everybody's a direct coworker meant we couldn't build that mind-meld over time, either. So we had to pick up the slack with massive over-specification.

[mavhc]

if you can write a specification with no ambiguities you can just execute it, because it's code

[ninalanyon]

Not just with outsourced developers. Computer science graduates hired in house to assist in writing specialised engineering software can often be a dead weight in the team for quite some time. This is not just because they and the engineers don't speak the same language but also because the CS graduates know nothing about physics and engineering so they cannot properly evaluate requirements documents.

Left to their own devices they often implemented requirements that were full of errors or even completely unnecessary because they did not understand the domain well enough to ask pointed questions.