How to Hire a Dedicated Team for a Software Development Project?

Regarding software development, outsourcing becomes one of the main options for embodying your ideas. Moreover, dedicated software development teams are popular not only as a solution for developing software projects from scratch. Instead, it allows a variety of use cases, including the improvement or extension of already existing projects, continuing the development, implementing new features, etc.

In fact, it has numerous advantages over regular in-house development. For instance, it allows you to hire a development team mainly consisting of niche-experienced developers. Moreover, it is very cost-effective. Clearly, cheap won’t guarantee quality. Still, such a statement is arguable. For example, if you consider Ukraine for outsourcing, you will find out, that Ukrainian dedicated developers are showing great development results with a much cheaper paycheck. Moreover, there are numerous examples of well-known software projects, which originally came from Ukraine.

Summing up all the above, outsourcing is a great way how to develop a software project, which allows you to save time and resources, or even minimize your own role in the software development lifecycle. While in-house teams require establishing numerous processes like project management or constant consultations, the outsourcing approach requires only one step - to hire a development team. Actually, most companies, which are proposing outsourcing models, are eager to take care of all related aspects. It includes software project planning and estimation, setting up the agreements, choosing the tech stack and niche-experienced developers, outsourced project management, etc. But now the question appears: How to correctly hire dedicated teams for software projects?

Preparation and Planning Stage

First thing first, you need to plan your software project. Anyway, you will plan everything again once more, when you will hire dedicated teams. However, before choosing an outsourcing company, you need to understand what exactly you are looking for. To rephrase it, you have to set up the main requirements for the software project. Whether it will be a cross-platform app, website, hybrid application for mobile devices, or, maybe, a native iOS/Android app, will you choose the agile or plan-driven development approach, etc?

Frankly, each of these options directly impacts what to choose. Despite the fact, that almost each outsourcing company can develop any of these applications, the development specialists will vary. Moreover, some companies are also niche-experienced, meaning that they can show better or worse results in various industries.

Having such general information about your projects like the preferred platform, available resources, scale of work, possible tech stack, and others, you will be able to make a better choice and will definitely know whom to hire, whether it will be a dedicated development team model, or you will need only a few freelance software engineers, which is also an option. Clearly, if you are going to create a simple flashlight app for android with only a few features, you don’t need a remote team of developers, experienced in web applications for eCommerce.

After you figured out the main working aspects, you will have to look for a reliable outsourcing company, which is experienced in such developments. The easiest way is to simply check their website and overall awareness of the brand, meaning that you will need to look for them on various B2B research and listing platforms. For instance, Incora is recognized by GoodFirms as the best company to work with.

So, your research will, most probably, end up with a few candidates, who meet all your requirements and seem to be able to develop your product. Therefore, your next step is to contact these companies and arrange a meeting. During these meetings, you will discuss your plans and the possibilities of the company, terms and agreements, plan and estimate the required time and resources for the software development process, consider possible developers, etc. Once again, these consultations are not final. Eventually, at this stage, you will have to proceed with a standard software development process, which helps to “round up the numbers” and clarify all the development-related aspects.

Signing the Agreements

Finally, when all the discussions ended, you will have a better understanding of the possible contractor to work with, as well as some additional calculations, clarifications, and pieces of advice from the developers’ perspective. Do not underestimate these, because they can highly improve your future product. In fact, niche-experienced developers can significantly upscale your product. Having a previous experience in the development of similar software projects, they may be more aware of the unseen technical or business issues or demands of the target audience. Still, it is worth admitting, that even if they will share such knowledge with you, they will do so after signing the agreement and officially working with you.

This is why it is worth paying lots of attention to case studies of the possible companies you are willing to work with. Remember, that your success is their goal. Thus, trust their decisions and constantly discuss various additional ideals.

So, if you have already chosen an outsourcing partner, it is time to consider the working terms. They include a wide range of aspects and extra contracts or agreements, yet most of them are prepared by the outsourcing company, so in this case, all you need to do - is to sign. However, before signing the agreement, you still will have to discuss at least the most crucial parts. For example, whether your agreement is based on time and materials or fixed price cooperation type.

Still, some documentation is your direct responsibility. For instance, if you will operate in European Union, or will get access to the private data of its citizens, you will have to prepare DPA documentation, which will define the access of the dedicated team to this data and how can it interact with this information. Anyway, most development companies warn and help their business owners with all such documentation.

Choosing Your Project Team

Finally, after all the bureaucratic and planning stages are done, you can get to the development itself. Summing up all your previous conclusions and recommendations, you have to choose the specialist for the project. Actually, there are countless ways how to do it. You can rely on your outsourcing company and delegate the candidate selection process, or take an active part in such process. You can simply conduct a general interview, or require showing technical skills, or specialist background. Nevertheless, most such companies insist that the team must be hired at once and that company can recommend or even choose a part of the developers themselves.

Still, this process depends on the previous agreements. Therefore, to save you from unpleasant situations, and make sure you are aware of the basic principles, we would like to give you some advice. For instance, our standard dedicated team consists of 5 members: 2 web and mobile developers, who are familiar with both front- and backend, 1 PM for outsourced project management, 1 DevOps specialist, and 1 QA team member. Judging from our experience, it is an optional tam composition, suitable for most software projects. Yet, if the project is more complex or scalable, we can add extra web and mobile developers and DevOps specialists.

Software Development Lifecycle

Eventually, the final stage is the software development process itself. It can vary, depending on your business requirements, the project’s possibilities, and agreements. Sometimes, clients want to be updated and aware of each step and change, implemented by the developers, and be able to monitor the work, taking an active and direct part in the development. To make it possible, they usually insist on having an in-house project manager, who will communicate with the outsourcing team.

Instead, we encourage our clients to choose outsourcing project management. In fact, it is our basic option, included in dedicated teams services. It is a win-win strategy, allowing both sides to avoid intervention in the development. An outsourced PM is able to directly communicate with the whole team in no time, keeping the client up to date and sending reports with other documentation.

However, this part is debatable and can be changed regarding the will of the client. For example, in some of our projects we use the foregoing “Team - PM - Client” system, in some, we have specified “Team - Client” chats, which allows for improving the direct contact between both sides, sometimes we propose more agile development and communication strategy when we communicate with the clients on demand.

Frankly, the most common issue, which appears, when it comes to outsourcing, is how to keep a manageable outsourcing team. As a matter of fact, it is highly important to establish great communication. It can solve almost all issues, which may appear during outsourcing. The rest is a direct responsibility of the outsourced company.

Summary

It may seem to be a challenge to hire dedicated teams. Numerous questions or problems may appear. Yet, as we stated before, there are only a few real concerns. So, if somebody wants to outsource their software project, they have to take only a few steps, the rest will be taken care of on the other side by the outsourced company. Software outsourcing has already proven its effectiveness and “win-win” nature. It allows not only development from a scratch but constant improvement or support of an existing application. Moreover, it is cheaper and allows gathering niche-experienced developers within a project, being much more flexible than an in-house team.

To prove our statements, we propose you check our case studies to see how experienced and successful outsourcing companies can be. Remember, while an in-house team works on a single project at once, outsourced teams can simply gain more relevant experience by working on various projects for the same period of time.