Ultimate Guide to Successful Outsourced Software Development

For most startups it’s difficult to initiate and upscale the software development process. This is exactly why the outsourcing model became a common practice for many of them.

The main goal of outsourced software development is to reduce the costs without impairing productivity. As studied, it can save you up to 60% of your overhead costs. So, unless you have an experienced in-house team, we would recommend considering to outsource or outstaff. Even if it might seem like not an option now, we still recommend reading this article. Whatever strategy you are currently pursuing in your daily business operations, it’s always useful to know the key benefits of all the options available out there.

Being a company with 10+ years of commercial software development experience, we want to share with you our practical recommendations. Here are your first steps in building a successful outsource developed product.

1. Define your technology stack for outsourced development

Technology stack is a mix of programming languages and different kinds of software, which is needed for to deliver a software product. Picking the right combination of these two makes a sizeable impact on the course of your future product. If you are not a tech-savvy entrepreneur, you should spend some of your time consulting with a few unrelated developers or outsourced software development companies. Some of them will probably propose choosing the technologies, which these developers feel most comfortable working with, not necessarily being the best option for your product. Here, at our office, we permanently employ a wide range of programmers with various skill sets and we’re always open for a consultancy meeting with startup entrepreneurs.

2. Fix your outsourced team, budget and work schedule

Running out of resources is a common issue for any kind of business. To prevent this situation you need to plan your finances and choose your team depending on the time-and-cost estimate of your future app. A time-and-cost estimate of a project takes time, knowledge and relevant domain experience. If you lack these, your estimate will not be accurate making it essentially useless. Before making your final decision on selecting the right company, check their reviews, consider the differences in time zones and make sure their English skills are good enough for further communications.

3. Guide your outsourced developers

Obviously, you need to control the workflow and the development process from its starting point till release date, because many of the outsourced development agencies can provide you a project managers and technical leaders. But, miscommunication is still a very common problem in IT management.  Numerous firms consider themselves as independent workers who can work autonomically and efficiently at the same time. It may be so, but don’t rush to leave your outsource team unsupervised. Frequent communication with your team will allow you to clarify important details apart from being in control. Setting your goals & scheduling the project is a good way to ensure the optimal final result. There is a big variety of communication services on the web which will help you deliver instructions to your contractors.

4. Keep everything planned

Before giving a green light to the creation process of your final product to an outsourcing agency, you need to plan what and when you want exactly to achieve. To define the crucial points of a desktop or mobile application outsourced development workflow you can always consult with a project manager or a technical leader of the company responsible for delivering the product. Besides, qualitative planning is a considerable tool for making reasonable deadlines. Business always tends to reduce the timeline of the project, but knowing the technical side of the work will prevent it from being unrealistic.

5. Secure your data

If you want to delegate your engineering process you need to inspect the security standards of the company you’re planning to work with. Remember that your outsourced product development does not end after hitting the market. Check if your partner uses recent encryption technologies to ensure the safety of your project. According to HakerRank, Ukrainian outsourced developers are making the most secured applications. If you’re still have some doubts about outsourcing in Ukraine, we highly reccomend you reading this article.

6.Be technologically  flexible and up-to-date

As with any other business, outsourced software development is a constantly changing sphere. The rapid evolution of technologies, programming languages and different kinds of software solutions changes the rules from time to time. When developing projects, it’s vitally necessary to be in touch with current updates in the software development world. This is achieved through a number of activities, including community memberships; pet-projects and internal R&D to test new frameworks/libraries/languages; blogs and podcasts of industry pioneers; attending events and conferences; reports by and exchanging opinions with other highly motivated engineers working in your company etc.

We believe that these recommendations will help you to kickstart your first outsourced project. To sum it up, like any business, outsourcing  is all about the correct management of  tasks, finances and people. And don’t forget, that half of the success depends on choosing the right partner.

If you are looking for right outsourced development partner, we infer that  OS-System – web and mobile outsourced software development agency is one of an opportunity for your business. OS-System provides full-cycle development from initial concept to a live application. We are committed to providing you with the highest levels of service that we can deliver. We continually assess our performance, the evolving needs of IT-business in general and our client base in particular, and adapt and improve our processes/performance accordingly to ensure we continue to deliver a service that meets or exceeds the needs and expectations of our clients and partners.

OS-System. We build your ideas.