Key Areas of Consideration before Outsourcing App Development

Most small businesses do not know much about software development. But they cannot do away with the digital branding exercises either. Most notably, they need to build their own branded apps to stand competitive in the market. Naturally, they have no choice but to outsource app development projects.

While small businesses have the irrepressible necessity of having their mobile footprints, the lack of technical expertise pushes them towards outsourcing app projects. No wonder a whopping 79% of small enterprises outsource their app projects. But with their lack of development knowledge, even outsourcing the right team remains no small challenge.

This is why we will explain here some of the key challenges and considerations that you need to focus upon before outsourcing your app development project.

Suitable Outsourcing Destination

The first and foremost consideration should be the location of the development companies or the app developers for your app project. For choosing the right country to outsource app projects, focus on the following key things.

• Currency and Traditional Cost Advantage: Some countries with underrated currency and traditional low wage rates can offer great cost advantages to the app projects from developed countries. Outsourcing app development to India helps you to build a fully customized applications as per your business need to outsmart the competition also save time and money.
• Impact of the Time-Zone Gap: Some countries located in the opposite part of the world can be disadvantageous despite their rich talent pool. On the other hand, some businesses can benefit from a full 12-hour time zone difference as they can keep the project going round the clock. One needs to consider how and to what extent the time-zone gap impacts.
• Software Development Market: There are matured and well-grown software development markets in many parts of the world. While some countries are known for expert small enterprise app developers, some countries have a predominant development market for high-end software products. So, the choice of the outsourcing destination also depends upon these characteristics and market focus.
• Impact of the Cultural Differences: Language barriers and cultural differences still can greatly impact the collaboration of the app developers to a great extent. Developers from francophone countries tend to have difficulties working with the projects from anglophone countries. The impact gets even bigger with the developers or businesses from countries speaking Mandarin.

Know Where to Find the Right Talent

For an outsourcing app development project, you first need to research extensively to onboard the right app developer talents. For finding app programmers with exceptional set of skills and technical command, you can take the below-mentioned routes.

• Are you looking to hire experienced freelance app developers for your project? In that case, there are several great places to find them. Upwork, Toptal, Arc.dev, YouTeam, and freelancers.com are some of the best ones.
• Do you want to hire a team of developers from a reputed app development company with a great portfolio and industry rating? For this, searching B2B sites such as Clutch, GoodFirms, Dribble, and a few others can be a good option.
• Searching on Google and using the Google Map extractor to find reputed development companies in every region will also help you find many credible options.
• Job portals and business-oriented social platforms such as LinkedIn, indeed, Glassdoor, etc are also great options to know about leading development companies and their skills.
• You should also search developer-community platforms such as GitHub and StackOverflow to know about the most active and skilled developers and their previous projects.
• Lastly, discussing with other industry leaders, CTOs, and senior developers will help you access the right developer talents.

Know How to Evaluate the Technical and Soft Skills

Hiring the developer resources can lead to a complete debacle for the project or huge drainage of resources if you go wrong. When outsourcing developers, you need to have your focus fixed on a detailed assessment of the tech skills and the soft skills that the app project needs. Let’s mention some time-tested measures.

• Prepare a PRD

Prepare a very detailed project requirement document (PRD) explaining everything about the app, starting from the core app idea to the app features and functions, intended user experience to the target platforms, and the corresponding tech stack to the budget and timeline. This document will guide the entire project from start to finish.

• Remote Technical Interview

After shortlisting the development companies and developers, it is important to start screening them through a remote technical interview headed by the CTO and your technical team. Prepare the questionnaire based upon the skill and your project requirements right in the beginning.

• Pair Programming Test

A demo coding test or a pair programming session with the in-house and the remote team working on the same project is necessary. The pair programming session will particularly help you understand the programming abilities and the collaborative development skills of the remote team.

• Soft Skill Assessment:

Lastly, always evaluate the communication skills of the developers and their attitude towards learning and ability to think out of the box and deliver 7niwue solutions. These are best evaluated through a soft skill assessment process.

Make Sure You have Expertise in Remote Project Management

Hiring a remote software development team is one thing and handling the team to shape a successful app product is completely a different thing. Without the second in proper order, acquiring the right talents may not necessarily be productive enough for the app project. It would help if you had an expert project manager with experience and a track record across multiple projects. For successful remote project management, consider the following tips.

• Ensure Streamlined Communication: First of all, keep all communication channels open to allow app engineers to speak up their minds and reach out to you in any situation when they need your help or mere consultation. Make sure they have all the communication channels at their disposal to reach out to you during the development. Make sure all-important communication with the remote developers is documented, and the important things make their way to “to-do lists”, calendars, or priority lists.
• Use Industry-leading Project Management Tools: Modern software or app projects can reduce time consumption and make collaboration and task allocation easier by using some of the best project management tools such as Trello, Asana, Etc. Ensure you have a well-trained project management team versed with these tools and techniques.
• Keep Motivations Higher: Lastly, never downplay the core project management principles that the world’s most successful software development companies adhere to. Instead of policing the employees, make them accountable for the job tasks and always try to solve their problems collaboratively. Secondly, maintain a lucrative reward and recognition mechanism to keep them motivated throughout the project.

Wrapping up

All the practices, principles, and considerations mentioned above have remained tested and tried across a world full of successful app projects. Naturally, you cannot reinvent the wheel, at least regarding these core principles for remote outsourcing considerations.

Even after doing all of these, an app can just become a market failure. But without doing all these, your app is bound to test failure even if you do all other things right. Naturally, you should rather see things considerations as success principles for app projects of all types.