Good points. How much is too much? How common is common sense? Depends on the audience I suppose.

You rarely go wrong with too much information. I say the more detail the better, especially if it is an off-shore project.

Lesson learned on my part.

Perhaps. But it seems there’s also a difference in expectations.

They were expecting to follow the written Requirements precisely. That implies the need for full, comprehensive, less-ambiguous Requirements.

You were expecting that this sort of Requirements wasn’t needed – that they would understand what you wanted even if it wasn’t completely specified in writing, or that you could guide them over time to understand what was wanted.

This can happen any time that expectations aren’t coordinated up front. It can happen with offshoring, local outsourcing or insourcing.

Quality Guy and Tester are not the same in my book either.

I wondered about this mix up with the Q-words and testing earlier, but these days I’m beginning to think that using the Q-word in testing-related activities can be confusing – because people start sub-conciously thinking QA or QC, then it’s an uphill task.

Don’t we just need to raise the bar (and awareness) for what the tester is doing and adding into the product?