Experience of Low Cost Reigon Software Mantainance

HI, Has anyone got experience of outsourcing thier software maintenance for embedded system to LCR (India, China etc). One of our senior guys has seen an article (!?!) about how much this technique can save. I'm a little sceptical that it applies to embedded systems, especially as there is very little documentation to explain how our products work.

I have had a surf around the internet but did not find anything useful.

Ta

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Kevin
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Kevin Harvey
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Kevin Harvey wrote: : HI, : Has anyone got experience of outsourcing thier software maintenance for : embedded system to LCR (India, China etc). One of our senior guys has seen : an article (!?!) about how much this technique can save. I'm a little : sceptical that it applies to embedded systems, especially as there is very : little documentation to explain how our products work. :

I don't think anyone here will favor outsourcing. Most of us are either barely hanging on to our jobs or looking for work.

I would suggest being responsible in your community, and hire local talent... But i'm biased, and i'm an engineer, not a manager type.

--buddy

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buddy.spaminator.smith

I haven't any direct experience, but all the second-hand stories I've heard have been negative -- if you don't have 100% perfect specs and documents, you haven't a snoball's chance in hell. If you _do_ have perfect docs, it's still a communications and project coordination nightmare.

One project I'm familiar with contracted out some embedded software (to a domestic firm) that would have taken one full-time engineer about 6 months to write. It took a year and required one engineer pretty much full time to co-ordinate the project and test the "intermediate" releases. When they were done, the product sucked, and they had spent a boatload of cash _plus_ twice as many man-hours as it took to do the project in-house.

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Where's th' DAFFY
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Grant Edwards

I think the long-term analysis will show that the smart manager types listened to the engineers on this one.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Why not show your guy this article, for a different take on the costs of doing this:

Basically, Alibre is saying "We knew this was a risk going in, and the only thing we can do is threaten the Russian government that other people will boycott Russia if there isn't a public lynching REAL SOON".

China is particularly bad, as wherever your workers are there is a factory across the street that can and will reverse-engineer your hardware and be manufacturing it inside a couple of weeks, if it's worth their while.

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Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards
÷ ÐÉÓØÍÅ Wed, 29 Oct 2003 16:46:32 +0000, Kevin Harvey ÎÁÐÉÓÁÌ:

Hello. Have you any idea about how you can find GOOD specialists in those country's? People from ex-USSR republic who work in this counties tell me that level of spetialists from Idia and chaina is very poor. But promotion can be very high. An example some people told me that some people can made few WEB sities with non-existent firm with non-existent projects and spetialists only for searching customers.

Sorry for my english.

Reply to
artem

I had a really bad experience with software written by a major Indian company that, as it turned out, obviously didn't assign anyone with basic embedded system experience to the project, or even professional-level C knowledge. Language and time zone problems exacerbated the situation. I have also worked with an excellent Indian software developer who was in the US on a green card, but later returned to India. I wouldn't hesitate to send any kind of embedded software work over to the company that she started there.

Reply to
Jim McGinnis

Speak for yourself. TWIAVBP

Some of us have more work than we know what to do with.

Reply to
Geoff McCaughan

Need to outsource some of it to a highly talented embedded and hardware engineer (errr... that's me) in Aus? And no sheep jokes, I promise :)

Mike Harding

Reply to
Mike Harding

Geoff McCaughan wrote: : snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org.invalid wrote: : :> I don't think anyone here will favor outsourcing. Most of us are either :> barely hanging on to our jobs or looking for work. : : Speak for yourself. TWIAVBP : : Some of us have more work than we know what to do with.

Then send some of it my way! :)

(recent grad, trying to get a foothold blah blah blah)

--buddy

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buddy.spaminator.smith

It's got *nothing* do do with India vs. Indiana. It's just plain outsourcing vs. insourcing. Outsourcing software (embedded software in particular) is _hard_ _to_ _do_. It involves significant overhead and cost to manage and coordinate. It reveals huge problems in communications and documentation that wouldn't be problems when the design engineer is sitting

15 feet from the marketing guy who's sitting 15 feet from the manufacturing guy, and the three of them eat lunch together.

Most of the horror stories I've yeard (and seen personally) happened with embedded SW outsourced to domestic operations. But, I've talked to Motorola employees who had similar bad experiences outsourcing their embedded software to Mo's Indian SW operations that were supposedly CMM level yadda-yadda. They sent spec over, software comes back, and it just doesn't work right. Not because of the color of somebody's skin or because of their religion -- because the person designing the software had _zero_ knowledge of the application area, because the person designing the software never met or talked to a customer, because the person designing the software had never been to a customer site, never talked to the marketing person, never talked to the manufacturing engineers, never talked to the hardware design engineers.

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Grant Edwards

I've done it multiple times, and it's very difficult. Even splitting a project across a couple timezones in the US makes life difficult. Split it across an ocean and different language, and life becomes miserable fast.

Even if you're working with bright, competent, hard-working people. A discussion that would have taken two minutes evloves into a week long exchange of e-mails and phone messages. e-mails and messages that often have to be repeated multiple times over a period of days before the language difficulties are overcome.

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Grant Edwards

[..]
[...]

It would be nice to have names, dates, etc. I suppose that will not happen because no one likes to document failure, especially for external consumption.

Reply to
Bryan Hackney

None of the employers I've ever worked for would tolerate having that sort of internal information bandied about in public. So I'm afraid it's going to have to stay vague and UL-like: well I knew a guy who worked with a guy who...

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Where's th' DAFFY
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Reply to
Grant Edwards

I have some experinece in non-outsourcing the firmware.

In my experience, firmware cannot be specified from the beginning. In many cases the requirements are not really known. Firmware and application grow on each other over the development time and afterwards. A few protocols and/or differential equations are just not sufficient.

The embedded software or firmware can be considered the core knowledge for a company in many fields.

There are fields of embedded stuff where the products are sold for their specifications, regardless of the firmware. HP/Agilent is such a case. While the specifications of their products ( those I use at least) is outstanding, the firmware is lacking and could be improved. Such cases are seldom, though.

For possibly the vast majority of companies selling embedded products, it is less that their specifications are outstanding, but that the product is useful due to the firmware. This is then what differentiates this company from its competitors. So the firmware is usually kept on a save place, eg at the senior engineer who also happens to be part owner of the company. Any employees only see tiny parts of it. Therefore it is absolutely unthinkable to outsource the firmware to a befriended/owned company, let alone to strangers wherever they may be located.

Rene

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Reply to
Rene Tschaggelar

So how are things going in Oz these days anyway? It's rather strange for us here in NZ hearing all these guys from the US running around like the sky is falling in, yet here things are ticking over quite nicely.

A lot of them seem to think that because the US economy is hosed, so is everywhere else.

Reply to
Geoff McCaughan

They are not good here. It's hard to say exactly why, on the face of it the Oz economy is doing pretty well but I suspect the figures for the manufacturing sector may show poor results in the hi tech areas, if you looked deep enough. The reps from distributors are a good indicator of what's happening overall and they are not happy bunnies. My guess is that a lot of the big companies are moving things either back to base or out to China/Korea/India etc with the subsequent knock on effect. Beats me why the government doesn't put up some really attractive tax breaks etc to encourage more manufacturing here.

Trouble is the US economy is so big that it does have a serious effect on everyone else - perhaps you're supplying a niche market? They are often immune to these wider economic issues.

Mike Harding

Reply to
Mike Harding

We tried to outsource a project to India back in 1999. We were lucky to have some connections and after a visit there we had three (engineers) from India here for 7 months for training and transfering the know how. After this time we had to stop the process cause it turned out that the know how was not transferable in such a "short" time.

Out of this experince my conclusion with regard to outsourcing was:

- There are well motivated people in india, but like elsewhere there are also others which just want "a job". Or in other words the human factor is the same no matter where you are.

- The basic skills they have is usable yet usually not really fully on the level of local engineers. However if you are lucky and have really eager to learn people they can catch up.

- If you really want to do this with a reasonable amount of efforts on your end and at least a good chance for sucess, you must also outsource your senior engineer :) I.e. he must move to India and work there with those people.

I figure most of the the fuzz about outsourcing and the (sucess) stories around this go back to Y2k projects which were really not that daunting tasks and where we - if we are honest - were happy not to be involved with.

So, if all this is just for maintaining an old project, I figure it's cheaper in the end to dedicate a local person to it (i.e. use fewer people) than to outsource it to any far away place. Usually people forget about the imense efforts it takes to comunicate, to check the work you get back, and to document / specify and also the increased costs for the unavoidable traveling.

Just my 2¢ though.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg

"Kevin Harvey" wrote in news:bnoqte$p0k$ snipped-for-privacy@potlatch.tc.fluke.com:

I have a lot of experience in this field and my company is currently offering a special introductory offer that you may be interested in.

We will maintain your software for free, no, that's not a typo we will do it for free!!! just send us the source and schematics, it's as simple as that.

Don't bother wasting any money on legal contracts, patents or copyrights because as you know a couple of small changes will circumvent this unless you a blue chip company.

As part of the offer if you also send us your customer database we will do free market research on your behalf on how they would like to see the product improved.

Don't wait, the saving you will make for your company will guaranty promotion!!!

Reply to
an

an wrote in news:bnto61$hkj$ snipped-for-privacy@hercules.btinternet.com:

Sorry I forgot to mention are November offer.

If you send use a design that we feel is a great product and your production is >10,000 and < 1000,000 parts a year we will send you £100. If production is >1000,000 parts a year it goes up to £1000.

Don't wait this money could be yours. Don't sit back being a team player, show people you are a team leader and get that promotion you deserve. Saving your company money guarantees you the promotion you want and deserve!!!

Reply to
an

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