Why?
Offshore development teams are usually engaged to reduce costs, meaning a commensurate measure of language barriers, difficult time zones, bootcamp graduates, and trainee staff, and if things start falling behind, the only leverage an account manager has is to add more staff, almost certainly making things worse.
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Legacy business systems usually have embedded business rules and workflows, built up over many years, with the knowledge retained in the heads of long-serving employees, who often leave without writing them down, especially if disgruntled when departing.
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Physically distanced staff, often with English as a second language, trying to acquire domain knowledge and surface complex business rules, that are embedded in complex legacy codebases, or located inside the heads of staff, some of which may have already left the building.
We empathise, we really do.
Itโs a complex situation to find yourself in, particularly if you are on the โoffshoreโ side of the equation, and the consequences of getting it wrong can be significant when the legacy system being replaced is business critical.
But it’s not the end of the world, and we’ve helped many teams in this very situation.