[ploureiro]

My short experience is the following:

- offshore or no offshore, scattered teams will have a lot more communication problems (= waste of time, requirements not fulfilled, etc)

- if you outsource a product, you will eventually get something that looks like what you asked. As soon as you throw it to prod, publish or whatever applies, you will find many unexpected problems. These problems usually are identified much earlier if you develop in-house. Possible explanations: Quick questions could have flagged those issues, but because teams are in different timezones, probably those questions got lost in a "todo.txt" somewhere.

- if you have to outsource, I recommend that you have people in your main office actually working with the remote team (doing the same tasks - e.g. coding). This way you know the quality of the product from the inside, how good are the people developing it, how extensible it is, etc.