In the 1990s, offshore outsourcing allowed developers to move resource-consuming development tasks to countries with lower costs, such as India and China. This process was similar to in-house development, with programmers working in a factory to implement designs built by architects. Despite some challenges being solved by expert offshoring organizations, the IT world has changed and created new difficulties for offshore work on Drupal projects.
These changes bring several issues to the table. Firstly, in order to achieve optimal results, more time must be spent managing details in iterations than following plans written on paper. If the developer does not understand the end users of their system, they will need support from someone else, such as a project manager, software architect, or business analyst. This requires more labor on site, which can increase costs and make the total cost of building the system more expensive than doing it locally. Additionally, the developer may not be considering multiple paths of implementation, which can lead to poorer quality.
Though these challenges make offshore outsourcing of Drupal work difficult, there are solutions. Limiting outsourced work to developers who are close to the customer physically and culturally, as well as only using people that are known or have been