Outsourcing of programming work to countries with lower cost-of-living expenses

[kee nethery]

 From what I understand from others who outsource, the big dividing line 
is a detailed spec and detailed testing and intellectual property 
security. If you know exactly what you want and it is pure coding, zero 
design, and you can test the code when you get it to make sure it 
actually does exactly what you specified, and if you lose nothing if 
the outsourcer gives the same code to their next client, then 
outsourcing can work quite well. If you kind of need something that 
does this kind of thing and has a user interface and you do not know 
enough about the problem space to write a detailed spec and you want 
this to remain a trade secret, but you can create a wish list, 
outsourcing does not tend work.

In my opinion, Revolution is geared more towards the I'm not sure 
exactly what I need and I need to write code to explore the problem 
space to help define what it is that I need, kinds of programming 
tasks. You can mock up anything and through actual interaction with a 
working system, determine exactly what you need. At that point, you are 
either done because the performance is fine, or you convert screen 
shots and algorithms to a detailed spec and see if that gets you what 
you need.

My two cents,
Kee Nethery