Hi all!
Currently I am trying to convince a company to make the switch to RoR as I did a couple of years ago. They are quite willing to do so but as they regularly outsource programming tasks they want to know if they still can when they make the switch. I have no experience in this and was wondering if anyone on the list might have. By outsourcing the company means using rentacoder.com. (Are there other alternatives to rentacoder?)
With kind regards, Harm
Yes! there are many ROR projects that are outsourced via Rent a Coder, elance and scriptlance etc
harm wrote:
Currently I am trying to convince a company to make the switch to RoR as I did a couple of years ago. They are quite willing to do so but as they regularly outsource programming tasks they want to know if they still can when they make the switch. I have no experience in this and was wondering if anyone on the list might have. By outsourcing the company means using rentacoder.com. (Are there other alternatives to rentacoder?)
The best possible way to develop is with programmers onsite. That way you can continuously review their progress, let them ask stupid questions, and generally prevent them from working too hard on unimportant features.
Rails makes that process very easy using unit tests. Your best situation would be to hire a programmer with _any_ web experience, and temporarily hire a Rails consultant to train them (>cough< you) to write unit tests as they write the tested code.
All these simple practices generally make a very few onsite programmers much _much_ more efficient than a horde of off-site programmers.
I agree with Phlip that on-site programmers are best. However there
are problems which can be easily framed and sent of elsewhere. For
example a database import where the end format is known.
And I very much agree with you on the best situation. 
And I am
trying to obtian exactly that.
Thanks for the comments!
Harm
Although I must say that a good project manager at the company you’re outsourcing to can make offsite outsourcing a real joy. My company has outsourced a Rails project to Lunar Logic Polska and Paul Klipp has done a fantastic job at managing the project, our customer was very happy with the application.
On the other hand, some projects demand a closer interaction between the developers and onsite developers can become a necessity (although they tend to be more expensive).
Best regards
Peter De Berdt