Insurer drops Indian date bug fixers as project slips

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For those of you following the use of foreign remediation firms, this is from Computer Weekly (UK, requires free registration but, IMHO, worth it).

A partial quote appears below, the full text is at:

http://www.computerweekly.co.uk/cwarchive/news/19990128/cwcontainer.asp?name=C15.html

Insurer drops Indian date bug fixers as project slips

A major London insurance company has abandoned plans to use programmers in India to correct more than 2 million lines of Cobol computer code for year 2000 errors.

Home and car insurer London General pulled the plug on a contract with a team of Indian programmers after the project slipped more than three months behind schedule.

India became a favourite place for UK firms to contract out testing and repair of computer software because of its low labour costs and high technical skills.

But London General this week cast doubt on the benefits of the practice, claiming that the long-drawn-out process of communicating with India made it all too easy to miss crucial deadlines.

London General has developed its own Cobol software, running on an IBM MVS 600 mainframe, over the last 15 years to control billing, claims, policies, and provide managers with sales and management information.

"We chose India because the cost of labour out there was at least half the cost of the UK," said Warren Cook, vice-president of information services at London General. "But they were far too optimistic about the time it would take."

"They were finding errors in the evening when we were not working. We picked them up the next day, but they were asleep when we were working and they did not get the answers until a day later," he said.

[... see link above for remainder of article ...]



-- Arnie Rimmer (arnie_rimmer@usa.net), January 28, 1999

Answers

Sounds like London General can kiss its a** goodbye.

-- a (a@a.a), January 28, 1999.

how *does* one say "mythical man-month" in hindi, anyway?

-- Arlin H. Adams (ahadams@ix.netcom.com), January 29, 1999.

Have you ever worked on a project of oh, say a hundred programmers, spread all over the world, in different time zones and each speaking a different language, each given a set deadline, each starting at different times, none of them talking to each other, nobody supervising the work done, nobody coordinating the work, no-one integrating, no set standards amongst the programmers, some programmers almost finished, one or two have finished, seven or eight are playing Doom, one or two are jerking off, one or two have finished jerking off, some will fix on failure, some have their heads up their asses, some see the urgency of the problem, some don't, some are working on the Euro also, some will be working on the Euro throughout 1999, some are giving up, some are bailing water, some are bailing out, some are sticking it out, many are pulling their hair out. Sound familiar???

We have a snowball's chance in hell folks of this turning out peachy.

Andy - getting balder by the minute...

"The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences beyond human imagination. But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to a certain collapse. In this way the end of the world will be brought about."

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, 1922 (Sufi Prophet)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 12, 1999

Link at

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000NZB

1 byte

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 29, 1999.


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