I hope that question about how to build relationship in outsource programming may be interesting to many developers in this forum. I’d like to know your opinion on that question.

My company (about 4 developers) started outsource programming 4 years ago. During this period, we found several types of the successful outsource projects (local projects has it’s own amazing specials).

1. “Do it like this”.
Something about half of the projects begins with the words: “We have an old software and now we want a new one, just like old, but using modern tools…” or “We have a demo version and we want to have our own application just like this demo…”. Due to the fact, that customers were software developers, all questions about functionality have one and the same answer: “Make your own solution, we shall correct it later”. As usual, the old application has source code with commentaries hardly understandable for us.

Such projects have their own good and bad sides:
Good ones are: 1) these projects has a budget
2) Customer has a vision of the results
Bad is that development time usually exceeds plan for 2-3 times.


2. “Do something nice”.
Another group of projects starts as “We have a good idea, let’s create an application and sell it”.
For these, the most important is to set a minimum budget for development – this minimum will be your pay. These applications usually don’t have a commercial success or they have, but you never know…

3. “Is it possible to do an airplane with water pool?”.
These projects starts with “We would like to investigate possibility to increase performance…”, “We would like to see how VFP works with…”, etc
This is a worst type of projects. It’s important to have an agreement about pay, because the possible sequence is:
“Can we work with this data source, (devices) … ” - (Response)“Yes, we can”
“Can we have a small application with all necessary functionality to demonstrate this possibility?” - (Response) “Ok, here is your sample”
“Perfect! We have a good start for our future project. We will speak about it next quarter…”
Usually, this means a death of the project.

Surely, we would like to take a part in outsource projects, created using latest developing recommendations with predefined technical requirements. But it’s a happiness that is somewhere near your…