[imechura]

My personal observation has been that the difficulty and set backs in the corporate adoption of outsourcing have not been due to the lack of capable programmers.

It has been associated with the lack of regular collaboration between the outsourcing resources and the customer. As a whole, this industry has not perfected the art of specification. An analysts with the ability to comprehensively specify software requirements is a scarcer resource than a programmer who can properly print a binary tree.

The lack of adherence to proper standards surrounding specification is generally compensated by ongoing collaboration between development teams and stake holders (hence the wide adoption of SCRUM). Separating the two entities with geographical, cultural and language barriers causes a break down in collaboration and that allows the deficiencies in specification to cause the project to fail.

I would argue that a bad team of coders with a water-tight set of requirements will have a greater chance of success than a team of rock stars with vague and incomplete requirements.