inShare Starting with the 90s offshore outsourcing allowed for moving resource-consuming development tasks to India, China and other low cost countries to ensure huge savings on millions-line coding projects. Programmers worked as a factory implementing designs built by architects and the working process was much like in-house. If significant offshoring issues like communication, quality and management were partially solved by expert offshoring organizations, when the IT world moved on, additional challenges have been posed by agile development and increasingly efficient technical platforms. Challenges These changes have caused several difficulties in offshoring work on Drupal projects. Here are they. To optimal results, your time has to be spent handling details in iterations, rather than merely implementing detailed plans written on paper. If a developer doesn’t understand end users of his system, he’s going to need much support from a person who does, usually represented by a project manager, software architect or business analyst either from the client or from the vendor. Higher amount of labor required on site means also more costs. The costs may easily be so high as to make the total cost of system building more expensive than performing it locally. What make things worse is that the above means different paths of implementation will not be taken in consideration by the developer who fails to fully understand a business case behind the requirements. Failing to consider multiple implementation paths may be a main extra cost in your Drupal project as there are always several ways to implement virtually anything. Detail implementation by the developer not quite related to the end user will likely cause poorer quality as well. The facts are even the most in-depth plans do not include all the details required for implementation, so these need to be agreed by the developer. In case the developer has insufficient information for such decisions, the result can be either poor quality or tons of comprehensive testing work. Solutions The above challenges don’t suggest offshore outsourcing of Drupal work is not possible, but it’s really difficult. Among the solutions aimed to facilitate possible issues are the following. Limit outsourced work to the developers who are close to the customer physically and culturally. Try to limit this work to the things easy to specify, such as integrations, overall theming, data migration, or module updates. Use only people you know or have met frequently face to face. This makes a great difference in your outsourced work’s quality. Since developers play a great role in the project, they should work with the customer very closely. Only after considering the above issues should you be planning your Drupal project offshore development.