Do it your self vs. outsourcing

I want to know what is better. Some says outsourcing is cost efficient and they enable you to concentrate on your main work (build cars not software). Other says the construcktor or consultant or what ever an external dont have the spirit of the company you work for - they want to do there work fast not best. The product quality is directly dependend on process quality. This process quality is dependend on ressources you use in process like software. When software is not good enough the product quality will also not good enough (in most cases where software is an important component of process). Other thing is if you outsource you also outsource the knowladge to external. When you are building cars it is not important to know how to build a software but if software is an important component in the workflow howto build a car then it is risky (maintaining the software) to outsource this component.

What do you think about ?

There are some factors you have to take into account when you are trying to decide whether to outsource a project. You touched on some valuable points, but I would like to enhance several other factors. Time, after you create your design requirements you need to figure out how much time you think it will take you to create such a project yourself, and balance it with your other work-related duties. It maybe that the time constraint alone requires you to outsource the project. Some of the factors that comes into play when you are considering time is how well do you know the underlying API or any 3rd party libraries you may use, and if using a 3rd party commercial library, you have to add that cost into the overall cost of employing someone else to do it that has access to this library, and if they decide to use a library make sure you know this as some library licenses only allow the developer who owns the license to make any changes.

I always tried to keep things in house because I wanted to know how the program runs so if a problem comes up I "semi" know where to go in the code in order to fix it, and all the depencies to the line of code I just changed. Outsourcing is a double edged sword and if you can come up with your product requirements from the very beginning you have a much better chance of coming up with an end product by a contractor that fits your company's mold.

If at all possible I would recommend keeping it in house especially for any "mission critical" type of applications.

I like to add that you may also like to assess the viability of outsourcing against the sensitivity of your work. If your work is highly sensitive, you should not even consider outsourcing as an alternative. It is especially so for R&D environment as you want to restrict the accessibility of sensitive information. If the product is already well-proven and you only want to add enhancement, I think it is alright to outsource. In this case, your programmers can be freed up to take on new challenging works. In addition, you may also like to check out the previous track record of your outsourcing company/people. It is less risky to engage an outsourcing company that has been working with similar stuff.

You may be interested in reading this article.