Recently I played in my sixth Invasion of Normandy paintball event at Skirmish USA in Jim Thorpe, PA. The Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association estimates that over 5.4 million people played the game in the United States in 2007.  It is the wildest, most insane and self-indulgent thing I do. One of my brother-in-laws talked me into this in 2004 and I have not missed one since. 

 

It is a re-enactment of D-Day and the landing at Normandy that starts on Saturday and ends on Sunday at 1:00 PM. This year 3,500 paintballers played (several hundred more would have played, but they have to limit the number due to the camping facility and infrastructure). Half represent the Allied forces and the rest the Axis side.  It is a true team sport where you depend on your comrades to cover and help you, not much different from our test teams at RTTS.

 

At noon on Saturday the Allied forces are placed in plywood replica troop carriers and all of the Axis players are over 100 yards away in the woods. Once a siren sounds, the plywood door drops and you, along with 100’s of teammates race out to face thousand of paintballs flying through the air.   If you don’t immediately get a face full of paint, you spend the next 45 minutes trying to break through the tree line by sprinting from pallet to pallet, barrel to barrel or mound to mound just in front of the tree line. The fun lasts until you run out of compressed air or pods filled with paintballs or until you can’t stand from exhaustion.

This year was the first that I got to experience breaking through the tree line with my teammates. It took a trip back to our camp site for my group and I to reload and rehydrate and about a dozen direct hits to my body.

And it is rewarding to win the battle.  Teammates (who you've never met) must come together as a group and support each other, communicate through verbal and non-verbal ways and ultimately work towards and achieve a common goal.  In the end, it's just like our software teams!

 

After the first battle,  which lasts a couple of hours, is won, the rest of the event is free-format. You insert at one end of the field and roam around until you find a fight to engage in. There are no rules to the free format except when it hurts too badly you leave the field of battle. My favorite part is making an enemy player run away or when I hit them so badly they raise their gun and retreat. Of course there is a price to pay and sometimes I was the one running away.  Although I had over 50 welts and I could barely walk on Monday morning, I can’t wait to do it again next year. 

If you would like to learn more about this event visit www.skirmish.com or visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMJRkT4QGbg to see a video of the fun.

Over the holidays I ran into my neighbor at a party. I asked her why she switched her landscaper last summer. She said her previous landscaper was the least expensive one she found, but did not do the job well, in fact he was awful. Then she added sometimes you get what you pay for. I knew what she meant. Whenever I went for the lowest bidder on a home project, I regretted it. 

 

The conversation reminded me of many of our clients that went with offshore solutions. In the majority of cases it was upper management’s decision to select an offshore consulting firm, mainly because of cost. While $20 per hour for resources was a common price (it has since increased), I had heard as low as $8 per hour. But most of the time these engagements ended in disaster.

 

One of the most memorable stories involves a client that asked their internal U.S. developers how much it would cost to develop a new system and the developers said five million dollars. The management team then went to an overseas outsourcing vendor and the bid came back at two million. They fired their developers and signed up with the outsourcer. Twelve million dollars later they had a partially built system that was a year and a half late.

 

I have been witness to quite a few other stories like this. For example, one client contracted two of our test automation experts. To save costs they also employed a dozen overseas consultants. The overseas consultants were instructed to create a specific number of test automation scripts in a two-month period. We were tasked with a similar workload. One week before the scripts were supposed to be run, the overseas group said that nothing was completed. When asked why, they blamed our Test Engineers and said we had not provided them with the proper information. Fortunately we were prepared for this false accusation problem because we had experienced it a number of times before. We had documented everything in emails, including the overseas management’s acknowledgement that we had sent them all the information they needed. They backed down immediately and agreed to work around the clock to fix the problem. Unfortunately this meant that one of our employees had to work 12 hours on Thanksgiving Day and another 13 hours the following Saturday, but with our help, the testing was successfully completed. The bottom line is the overseas consultants were not working towards completing their tasks until they were called upon to show their status. There was no return on their low cost. 

 

We are not the lowest cost provider of software testing and we are also not the highest, but our clients tell us we are the best value for the buck. It is the main reason why a significant amount of our work is from repeat business - our clients say we exceed their expectations and they get more value than what they paid for.