Offshoring

Peter Coffee comments on Offshoring in his article, "U.S. Coders as Capable as Offshore Counterparts". He somewhat points at a report by way of a Google search. Of course, now that his article is out there more instances of comments on his article, etc. show up, such that the paper he refers to is no longer the second hit. Not sure if that is a Google endorsement trying to get people to look for it in that fashion or not. Anyway, you can get directly to the report he refers in his article by clicking here.

As Dutch Mandel (AutoWeek) states, "but wait there's more". I had read article in the digital of eWeek. For posting purposes went to the online article. Upon looking at it closer I find the following appended. Mark another one up for online - It is a bit harder to make such a note in print or a digital copy after they have been deployed.

Note: This column has been widely quoted, so I feel obligated to note here that the statistics I cite were affected by a data reduction error. That error has since been corrected by the research team at the MIT Center for eBusiness. Actual defect rates, it turns out, were generally higher than stated here, and the U.S. rate was notably higher than the rate for other regions, but there are reasons why that comparison may be misleading: I'll discuss these in my column of May 17.

I regret any confusion resulting from my reliance on the initial report, which was not labeled as a draft or working paper, but which was revised before publication in the journal IEEE Software for November/December 2003. The continued presence of the earlier version on the MIT Center's Web site, I'm told by one of the authors, was unintended.

—Peter Coffee

When I get a chance I'll try to look for the updated paper and point to it. If you have a link for it feel free to let me know via the comments. Thanks.

Update: The original paper is dated June 2003, the updated paper is dated December 2003. It appears that the only difference in the URL to the paper is the addition of a space in the newer version. Wonder if they actually meant to replace the older copy. Anyway click here for the newer paper.

The first report helped support the case against offshoring a lot better.

Peter's May 17th article is titled, "Setting the Programmer-Error Record Straight"