I've worked with 4 different ones now (in Bangalore and New Delhi). You want fixed price, fixed DETAILED spec, fixed timelines and assume that you don't want t

I've worked with 4 different ones now (in Bangalore and New Delhi). You want fixed price, fixed DETAILED spec, fixed timelines and assume that you don't want to maintain the product afterwards. That's worked well when we've had quant calculators that just need to done one thing. Expect there to be a high management cost on your side. Outside that, my experience has been pretty terrible and it comes down to a cultural desire to be positive all the time. Saying Yes all the time is a disaster, especially when dealing with non-technical business people. I'll give a couple of examples: 1. I've tech-Lead a large group (40+ but I interviewed more) of offshorers, the manager on the Bangalore side helped the devs through their coding interviews by recording my questions, working out the answers and handing them round. When I realised what was happening, I invented easy questions off the cuff and found the interviewees (on the other end of the phone) would pause and then give an answer they couldn't explain. I could even hear one guy typing in the question as I asked it. When we approached the Bangalore manager to sit in on the interviews, he said that he didn't see a problem, claiming over and over that he'd chosen the very best developers. The CEO still went with the agency and I found that the few good developers that agency had moved on because they were offered more elsewhere, leaving with the knowledge I'd trained them with. 2. We expanded our team by bringing in an offshore team. The Indian provider sent 6 to 8 (can't remember) "senior c# .NET developers" over for us to train on the system. One of the developers didn't know how to open a solution in Visual Studio and asked me where the "Run" button was. When I showed him the CV that had been sent over for him, he agreed that it was his and confirmed that he had 6 years .NET experience. How you can code in any framework for 6 years and not know how to press F5 is staggering (this was back in the day when VS was your only choice). None of the companies or managers I've worked with before would ever go offshore (outside of Europe) again. > How do we work on changing customer's perspective? A lot of this is cultural. What appears to be of acceptable quality to an Indian agency isn't OK where I am in the UK. Also, there needs to be balance between being positive while at the same time realistic. "Bending the truth" is part of the back-and-forth of Indian business but in Europe (and especially in software development), that's a disaster. The best you can do is act more like a Western business and how their perspective changes of your single company.