As an SME consulting company, we often come up against large offshore development set-ups and the classic accountancy argument “We’ll use them as their day rates are a fraction of yours”.  There is an obvious problem with this – software development is complicated and expertise gained over years of coding, integrating and testing can lead to orders of magnitude of improvement in speed of development and subsequent quality.

We’ve recently come up against an excellent example of this.  While on client site, we were integrating to a credit card provider in Mule via web services.  Mule supports CXF, Axis 1 and Axis 2 as Java WS frameworks, and they all have positives and negatives so we advised the client to use the same framework as their offshore supplier had used in the back-office system to ensure support and maintenance was made easier.  We subsequently discovered that, as they had no experience of Web Service integration, the offshore supplier had used HTTPConnection and DOM – i.e. they were hard-coding each web service call.

That afternoon, we integrated all 5 webservices and used Mule’s definition XML to model the control process.  In 4 hours work we had acheived the equivalent of over 200 man days of offshore development.

Expertise was obviously the clear winner here!