Zamples provides a facility for live code examples for C# and and VB.NET using Mono. Novell (sponsor of the Mono project) was kind enough to publish a news brief about us last month.
Zamples also provides a live code facility for Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, Haskell and various APIs. Learning by example is a fast way to learn, and Zamples is a good way for authors and software publishers to present their information interactively.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Zamples, Inc. Go gently on our servers, they probably won't survive being slashdotted!
I get called by senior management when they suspect that their outsourced project is going off the rails. Sometimes its too late to fix things up, and the CEO wants me to help build a legal case for them, other times they need leverage in order to renegotiate the contract so that it has a chance of succeeding. Outsourced projects that go wrong have cost many senior managers their jobs, and caused many smaller companies to go out of business.
Most projects that I see are not good candidates for outsourcing in the first place.
Some contractors are better at selling than delivering. A favorite tactic is to 'bait and switch' - dazzle a prospective client with the contractor's best people, then put drones on the job.
By the time I get called in, the mistake(s) have already been made, and some hard choices need to be made:
continue to put more money into the project with the current contractor and possibly force the contractor to shake up the development team and the process
consider how much more money this project merits, and press the contractor to complete it on a fixed time and cost budget
flush the project and walk away
flush the project and sue for damages
hire another team (or take it in house) and possibly sue for damages
BTW, a contractor that claims CMM Level 3+ certification carries a high overhead, and is unlikely to provide good ROI unless you are building a space vehicle or a nuclear submarine.
Once management realizes what the criteria are for a successfully outsourced project, I think we'll see development projects being done locally... for the same reasons that many managers don't want programmers to telecommute 100% of the time.
I wish I could get a keyboard condom for my laptop, like I have for my desktop. I had to throw away my last laptop due to water spilling on the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Zamples, Inc. Go gently on our servers, they probably won't survive being slashdotted!
I get called by senior management when they suspect that their outsourced project is going off the rails. Sometimes its too late to fix things up, and the CEO wants me to help build a legal case for them, other times they need leverage in order to renegotiate the contract so that it has a chance of succeeding. Outsourced projects that go wrong have cost many senior managers their jobs, and caused many smaller companies to go out of business.
Most projects that I see are not good candidates for outsourcing in the first place.
Some contractors are better at selling than delivering. A favorite tactic is to 'bait and switch' - dazzle a prospective client with the contractor's best people, then put drones on the job.
By the time I get called in, the mistake(s) have already been made, and some hard choices need to be made:
BTW, a contractor that claims CMM Level 3+ certification carries a high overhead, and is unlikely to provide good ROI unless you are building a space vehicle or a nuclear submarine.
Once management realizes what the criteria are for a successfully outsourced project, I think we'll see development projects being done locally... for the same reasons that many managers don't want programmers to telecommute 100% of the time.
I wish I could get a keyboard condom for my laptop, like I have for my desktop. I had to throw away my last laptop due to water spilling on the keyboard.
Mike