Ilya Shirshov has more than 5 years of experience in information technology and he has witnessed businesses make mistakes of choosing the wrong development team. These companies incur losses of more than AU$1 million in terms of bugs, time, delays, security issues, glitches, and other problems. A good example is the 606 software product fails incidents that have been recorded which have impacted over 50 percent of the population of the world, that's 3.7 billion people - and about $17 trillion worth of assets, in addition to a whopping 314 companies. You can imagine this kind of mess that occurs simply because a company chose the wrong software development squad. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many other similar cases of software bugs that aren't reported and probably the world will never know about them.
The reports on bugs from Tricentis raise a big question on the effectiveness of some developers in software testing and quality assurance (QA). When deciding on whether to outsource or not, the bet here is that you have to get the choice of developer correctly, otherwise, you could be in a mess. Every Chief Information Officer Todd Pierce has ever known, has had huge, board-visible projects in which a flaw detected at the final stages of the development process, particularly during the release date created a lot of mess.
Defects discovered at the deployment and release date create a very critical turn in events where the project has to be redesigned leading to tens or even thousands of dollars in massive delays, increased costs, and huge losses in credibility. Todd Pierce is a member of the Healthcare and Life Sciences Board.
Good quality developers stick to standards thereby ensuring that they deliver a good quality product. The focus of these developers is on the overall goals of your business and the planned results. The A-grade team is thoughtful in their coding work and don't just slap code together as it happens with those common developers who don't deliver.
QA and Testing is Very Important
If you're going to outsource a software developer India team, you need to share and put the focus on a common targeted goal of producing quality software that helps grow your business. And your company wants this happening. The best developer brings in the big expertise he has gained from producing software solutions in different industries for a certain period of time. SalesForces points out that the success in software development outsourcing is about leveraging the collective experience of the developers to help win in many kinds of challenges they face in the development process.
The outsource partners collaborate with many businesses in different projects - it is possible that they are able to use the critical skills and expertise they have gathered to deliver any software product. Here, experience and expertise matters, and when a developer handles many projects of different companies and industries, he or she is able to develop skill sets that you cannot see in a developer who is pigeonholed in just one industry or company for software development tasks.
A majority of the outsourced software development teams use their collective know-how in solving problems and are able to innovate the result. Most remote software outsource companies host regular meetings to allow the different individuals and members in developer teams to share on the things they are working on including the creative solutions, challenges, and software development success stories. With these insights, the team is able to benefit in terms of improving the quality of work they deliver since there is a cross-pollination of information.
Read the Blog: Is It Necessary To Start Contract Work With Software Developer?
It is likely that in a team sharing information if one member or developer has reached a dead end in a coding project, another developer is able to kick-start that process by bringing in a more innovative coding idea or troubleshooting a bug that has been detected. That way, the team is able to move faster and the developers gain a lot of knowledge in different coding industries.
It's typical to have a development partner with 20 to 30 developers meeting together to share insights meaning they gain a lot of experience and firsthand knowledge from each other. You can tap on that expertise and experience to be applied to your software product development.
It's important that when you hire software developer teams you consider asking the portfolio of work as well as the amount of success the outsourcing partner has had across different industries and markets when interviewing them whether as a group or as an individual. Besides, you need to ask them how they have applied the experience they gathered from the different markets in creating software. This way, you are able to know if they have indeed applied the experience and expertise in coding or not. Last but not least, you should ask for reference so that you can substantiate their work by talking to those businesses they have served to get information on how the projects were handled and the kind of experience they had with the coding teams.
Questions to Help you Find the Right Developer Team
After you have listed a short-list of potential developer partners to outsource, you need to evaluate them properly to see their success. It's best you meet them in person if you can so that you get a good insight into the abilities, strengths, and weaknesses they have. If you cannot meet them, you can organize for a virtual meeting using technology tools like chatrooms or video conferencing tools so that you communicate one-on-one through the channels.
Technology has made things easier and it's today possible to communicate with a team of developers in real-time and share your ideas, opinions, thoughts, suggestions, and other information. You can readily interview the teams from the channels. When evaluating the developer teams, you need to ask these questions?
- How Agile is your developer team?
- Is the team DevOps focused?
- Do you give security a big priority?
- What procedures do you have in place to help ensure business continuity?
- Do you have safeguards put in place to make sure that if a situation arises, you will keep the software development process on track?
- What kind of instruments do you use to collaborate with your clients?
These questions can help you understand the qualities of the team including their strong points and weaknesses so that you are in a position to find the developer team that best fits your project development needs. You need to focus on quality and longstanding success in your software development and deployment. It's also important you ask about the quality assurance testing if the developer is going to handle that process. These questions can help you understand the proficiency of the developer in QA testing.
- Will you provide a QA testing for the project?
- What number of QA tests do you intend to make to confirm the quality of the software?
- Is there regression testing?
- Is there static testing?
- Is there dynamic testing?
- Do you have visual testing?
- Do you employ white and black-box tests?
- Is QA testing going to be a priority for the project?
Create User Stories - short ones
If you want to communicate effectively, you need to create short user stories. They will help you pass across the vision of the software product you have to get in fine details showing the features without being ambiguous. It is important to have user stories if you want to see success in your project. The stories will see you tick all the software product vision boxes. The partner you are working with needs to understand what kind of outcomes you want. As the outsourcer of the development team, you need to relate with them in a way that results in the final software product bring a trouble-free, friendly and quality experience for the customer or end-user.
Collaborate for QA
Don't assume that the developer team understands what you need in terms of quality assurance. Every reputable developer encourages the product owner to take part in the QA testing process, but it should be your best interest to ensure you collaborate with the team in ensuring the quality of the product. When interviewing the team, you should have asked them: how do you ensure you effectively collaborate with the clients you are handling their projects?
Any trusted developer is always proactive to ask many questions and bring new, fresh ideas to the customer's table. The developer always wants to know about the end-users of the software and can make suggestions to improve the product to ensure even greater user experience. A perfect fit developer team would want to get involved in discussions and ensure they are keen to collaborate with you in solving problems. The plain truth is that if you as the product owner, you are not willing to engage and collaborate with the development partner to create the software, it is unlikely that you will meet your goal of creating a high quality software product.
Use the Power of This Statement, "This is what I think I should have!"
You need to communicate your software product idea using a passive voice, and this is something that may managers in companies or business owners fail to do. Being the client, you will be having discussions with the team to share the specifications of the software product and allow the developer team to bring those specs to life. What you should realize, however, is that it may not be easy for you and the team if what you think you should have isn't what the software users want.
So, have a detailed specification of the product you want and avoid using phrases such as, "this is exactly what I want!"
Rather, try to use a passive voice like, "This is what I think I should have?"
This way, you are giving room for the developer team to make improvements or changes that best fit your user needs. When you use the words "exact" you are limiting the creativity and smartness of the developer team in producing something better than what you want. You need to allow a creative environment to persist in the development process where the developer team can bring in fresh ideas and solutions that serve in improving the end product.
You don't want to limit the developer from being the product creator by downgrading them to be just doers who have to follow your instructions. This is not an ideal way of doing things. The developer needs room to ponder around and extract from development projects they have handled in the past and see how they can model out the successes and work on the failures to produce an innovative product. They have to look beyond what you, as the client think and be able to deliver the highest quality software.
Conclusion
These tips will help you ensure that you get the right offshore dedicated software developer team and engage it appropriately to come up with a quality software product.
