WebMantras

This post is in response to a question a mate of mine asked about selecting a good Outsourcing partner.

Firstly to debunk a popular misconception - Outsourcing isn’t just about cutting costs Its also about adding value.

Outsourcing can:

• Help achieve goals that you cannot achieve on your own
• Give you a competitive advantage
• Even make you money

Some types of Outsourcing:

• Business Process - Customer Service, Finance, HR
• Application - Development, Upgrades, Maintenance & Support, QA
• Infrastructure - Data Center, Network, Security

All the tips I gave my mate are covered in this excellent article on Outsourcing projects to India. The pros and cons discussed in the article apply to any country or type of project. You can also get a couple of good pointers from this article on sourcing good Offshore Developers.

Feel free to leave a comment with any Outsourcing question or tips you might have.

Recently at work we started writing Unit Test cases and I am absolutely loving it. Writing test cases first has helped us build and design a better API. Another advantage is that all written code is covered by a test. Even though writing test cases takes time it is totally worth it.

Writing test cases helps to build better software faster.

Here are a couple of links that can get you started:

1. Test Driven Development (TDD)
2. MXUnit
3. cfcUnit
4. Mock Objects
5. CFEasyMock

If you are using the CAPTCHA action with an cfimage tag you might run into the following error:

“Verify your inputs. The specified width for the CAPTCHA image is not big enough to fit the text. Minimum width: 415″

To display the CAPTCHA image without this error, the width value must be greater than: fontSize times the number of characters specified in text times 1.08.

Formula : FontSize x Number of Characters x 1.08

Registration for the Adobe MAX 2008 in San Francisco, California (November 16 - 19, 2008) is now open.

Adobe has released ColdFusion 8.0.1 Cumulative Hot Fix 1.