Does anyone here know of any methods or tools available for monitoring the amount of time spent by outsourced individuals/companies? More specifically, a way to make sure that the number of hours they say they worked have actually been worked?

If it makes a difference, this would be to monitor outsourced programmers to verify that we are paying for work really performed. Some programmers charge at the hourly rate (rather than per project) and sometimes it seems as though they might inflate the number of hours worked to increase their income. Are there any ways of preventing this? One way I thought of possibly was instead of paying hourly, paying per line of code? Or even per character?

Any ideas?

=) that's the perk of freelancing. you bill whatever for whenever.

but usually, you should get an estimated cost from the freelancer. if it's too much, the find another. don't think there is anyway to monitor. what's to keep a freelancer lying about their hours even to a tool/software?

Originally posted by derek1622
One way I thought of possibly was instead of paying hourly, paying per line of code? Or even per character?


Not possible, same thing can be coded in very many ways, the best programmers keeps the code short.

I have seen examples where new coders use up to 5 times more lines than an experienced programmer.

Suggestion:

Stop paying hourly salaries, and start paying for the project instead.

Make sure to write a good detailed project description before taken in qoutes on it.

Yep. The only real way to avoid the "hourly" bloat is to pay a set price for a set project.

Greetings:

1. As was suggested, pay for the project instead of by the hour.

2. Ask what time keeping methods are used.

If they program for a living, they probably use Time Slips (http://www.timeslips.com/) or similar software.

3. Always consider there is more than coding involved in a good project.

Back in the days we did custom programing, we included documentation time, project management time, client communication time, client training time, time for testing, etc. in our project bids.

Thank you.

I think paying for entire project might be difficult sometime. Pyaing for charcaters and/or line is not a solution - you'll support bad quality code.
I'll suggest you paying for features. Divide your projects in sub projects and features and ask your programmer to estimate each feature (how much it will cost/how much time to implement)
So if there are any changes during project - you just add features and not reestimate entire project.