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Managing a Global Programming Team?
cwimmer asks: "I work for a technology company in the United States who survived the economic slowdown by trimming fat where necessary. Unfortunately, it seems that my small programming team must've looked like mostly fat to management: it has been trimmed from a high of 5 to the current 2. We have been given a very large programming project that we estimated would take 4 coders (the size of the team at the time) 6 months to deliver. I have been given deep pockets with regard to moving some or all of the project to an offshore partner, and I can probably get 4 or 5 programmers in India. Does anyone have any pointers on managing a team of programmers on the other side of the world?"
And whatever you do, don't ask them about that dot in between their eyes !!
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
"A very large programming project" is not one that would take four programmers six months to complete. According to Counting Source Lines of Code, Linux represents some 8,000 person-years of development time.
Why would a "small programming team [of 5]" be given "a very large programming project"? It's your job to point out to your boss why this is doomed to failure.
You have been given "deep pockets" to hire "four or five" Indian programmers? Let's be generous, and say that you're paying each Indian programmer $30K a year. That's a budget of $75K for the six month job. That's "deep pockets" to you? $75K is your idea of a budget for a "very large programming project"?
Given all this, I don't think you are qualified to manage a software engineering project, especially a very challenging one that involves remote development.