One company I worked for outsourced (automated & manual) testing to EPAM in Belarus. They were *incredibly* good, with a standard of code & testing comparable to our own. I was gutted when the company was taken over by IBM who quickly stopped the contract.

I inherited a project done by Igate Patni in India. It was the *worst* code I have ever seen in almost 25 years of software development. It was about the level of a 10 year old child! Though to be fair, the project had suffered from several years of no technical oversight and constant deadline pressure. Outsourcers are only interested in meeting the specs, not in producing quality code. It is just that their priorities are different to yours.

Kind regards Trevor D'Arcy-Evans

I once had to work with a database like that. It was just a huge number of tables, as described, but with the added bonus of *no* foreign key relationships. Evidently, all foreign keys and referential integrity was handled by the application.