Monitoring and Steering
of 3rd-party Software Development Providers

Context

• IT department provides software innovation to business side via 3rd-party vendors.
• Coding is done by 3rd-party vendor.
• Optionally, testing is done by another vendor.

Pains

You own the project plan but have no reliable information about the current status of each work item.
If the vendor delivers too late, you are “somehow helpless” and need to accept the vendor’s excuses.
Missed milestone deadlines are harmful in two ways:

• Entire project might be at risk.
• Failed choreography with testers creates additional costs.

You have no visibility into delivered code quality (technical debt) and associated additional costs for follow-up releases.

Gains

Real-time insights into actual coding work would prevent costly surprises. Information about the vendor's compliance to best practices for test automation would reduce the costs for manual testing. Transparency of who-is-doing-what would motivate the vendor to create productive and stable teams instead of "borrowing" the best developers from your project for firefighting in other clients' project.