Software development in India

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After three weeks of working here I should say something about the software development here. What did I learn?

Well, I'm pleasantly surprised by the level of knowledge and professionalism here. The image Indians have in the West is of a bunch of robots who follow instructions by the letter and deliver really crappy code. But I found here that the process is very structured and people are very innovative in their thinking and work.

The project management and development methodology is very structured. They actually follow the rules here. First document the requirements, detail them as use-case, define interface specs and so on. There no wild coding going on but working on concrete user stories that have a limited scope and are thoroughly tested and reviewed when implemented.

The office is much like what you would see in the West. But they have whiteboards here all over the place. Very useful for tracking status and explaining things.

Each morning we start with a status meeting. We have our own meeting room dedicated for the project called the 'war room'. There is a permanent schedule on the whiteboard that tracks everyones tasks. Everyone updates their schedule and we find out if there are any todo's or issues that will stop us from working on our task. We also track working times and morale, which is a very good addition I think and a good indicator how the project is going. In the end we do a teamcheer "Bugs saare thalle thalle! TomTom di balle balle! *clap*" meaning something like "Crush all bugs! Hail TomTom! *clap*". They idea is to scream as loud as possible.

And everyone works really hard. They get in the office at 9 and earliest time to leave is 7:30. But very often people even work longer, there are still plenty of people around at 10:00. For some issues people will work until 12:00. Please stop doing that guys, that's not fair competition and it's not good for yourself either. Live a little :-).

Final thoughts. Outsourcing still is primarily about reducing costs. Indian developers are cheaper but I think that will change in the next 10 years. Already salaries and house prices are rising radically and companies have big trouble keeping their employees because they are getting so many offers. Considering the communication overhead that is there when outsourcing to India I think the costs benefit will go away slowly. But that doesn't mean outsourcing will go away. There are many very smart and hardworking people here and the West will need them not because of the costs but because of the brainpower.

It's been a very educative and also fun experience.

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