> Are they coding to a spec? If you're outsourcing you better be or you're just asking for trouble. I see these two as quite distinct. Coding to a spec, even a

> Are they coding to a spec? If you're outsourcing you better be or you're just asking for trouble. I see these two as quite distinct. Coding to a spec, even at the level of BDD, simply means making your implementation conform to some abstract behavioral specification. If writing code that could both adhere to such as spec and was easily maintained and extended in the future were easy, then outsourcing (or simply relying on the most junior programmers you could hire) would definitely be the only sane way to build software. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are a developer who wants to work and knows your craft) it is not nearly so simple. Even a perfect functional spec is usually at least 3-4 levels of abstraction removed from the actual code needed to implement it. More fine-grained BDD specs or unit tests may come closer to allowing for mostly mechanical translation into working code, but they also must co-evolve with the code itself.