I saw a lot of this at two of the web companies I worked in the mid-2000s. Outsourcing/offshoring was all the rage and it was tempting for a mid-sized web comp

I saw a lot of this at two of the web companies I worked in the mid-2000s. Outsourcing/offshoring was all the rage and it was tempting for a mid-sized web company to think, "you know, our processes are starting to break down now that releasing buggy code causes a lot more problems, but it's going to take months to build a QA team... let's offshore it!" It's not trivial. If your software development process can be described as, "some business guy writes an e-mail with four sentences and a developer works with him to implement the feature" or "production and dev environments are never in sync, but devs double as sysadmins and have access to production so they just modify configuration as necessary," then offshoring/outsourcing QA is doomed to fail. You need things like detailed specs and a consistent QA environment. I had projects that took 4 days to develop but 2 months to QA because every "bug" was either a) actually an intended feature or b) some inconsistency with my dev and their QA environment. Throw in a time difference causing a 10 minute hallway conversation now taking 2 weeks over e-mail, and very often a language barrier, and there is no other possible outcome except for an unmitigated disaster.