I am the senior engineer at my firm and I have been asked to outsource some of our projects. After much deliberation, we had two projects done this way. Here is the question... my team and I reviewed the solutions and found a pattern that we could not understand... here is one example: The ASP.NET application contained a few work steps where an email was to be sent. There were a total of 13 different instances. Each instance had code to read the app.config settings, set the mail properties and send the email. A new SMTP server required SSL and we had to update all 13 instances. SO... why would the developers code this 13 times, instead of writing a simple static method/function??? We took the solution apart and found this "pattern" all over the place.. lots of cut/paste, hard coded values, etc... I am missing something? Is this something we have to get used to when dealing with outsourcing? I know.. lots of questions.. but some insight would be appreciated... thanks.

LM