On my current project, we're starting one of the offshore components today. We will probably have them start it on Monday. It's a lot of work (nothing we wouldn't be doing anyway - just sooner than we planned on) to get it ready to go.

We're taking a slightly different approach than I originally thought we would. At first, we planned to ship an isolated piece of functionality to them, and have them build it soup to nuts. Then, after talking to a few people who have dealt with our off shore team (actually, they used our India partner. We will be using our Asia partner), we decided to mainly package up UI functionality, as that is what they had the most success with.

Now that we're actually doing it, we're blending the above two approaches. I will be handling any shared business logic, and data access (well, generating the data layer). They will handle business logic specific to their piece, and the UI they need for it, as well as the windows service they will need to develop.

Our approach has been to give them a database, a DLL with the needed API they can program against, a souce control environment that has skeleton projects they will need, and a set of requirements and process flows. Their first task is to provide us with a detailed design of what they will do, including more details on the process flow such as method calls, pseudo logic for each piece, etc. I already have an idea of how I would do it (that's how I made the APIs they will need), and I'll compare my version to their version. Once those two match up, they'll start coding, and we'll break up pieces into day long tasks. We'll check their code daily, and (at least initially) we'll integrate their code into our code base once it's done.

The first meeting is Monday to talk to them about the process. It should be interesting. I'll keep you posted.