Hiring a development team! What to look for?

Imagine you hired some engineers based on online reviews to build your system at a low hourly rate. First few sprints were great, they delivered and reached milestones on time, the functionalities of your software were getting better and better, and everything seemed to be fine. And then they hit a point where things start to slowdown, your online review based strategy tells you they will deliver something good next week, but they take another week on top. Their deliverables are not passing User Acceptance Tests anymore, so they take extensions week after week… And their solutions are not solving the problems. And this is where they are just thrashing their engine trying to solve a problem that is just too big for them! Replacing your developers at this point could be very costly, because new developers may need to start all over again!... So here are 6 things to consider before hiring a development team in the first place:

Find relevant experience:

Some engineers are great at building E-Commerce solutions, some are great at building social media apps, some are great at building games, and some great at building other solutions. When you hire someone for a programming position, look at previous experience and their work. Hire a team that has extensive experience relevant to your projects.

Depth and diversity in skill-set:

This is where in software development Specialist Companies with diverse skill-set can outperform small teams. Imagine a situation where your current development team is running out of ideas. If you have engaged a specialized software development company, that has more than a handful engineers working in-house, then they would be in a position to bring in extra help right away. This has been our strategy at Techverx | Mascottech LLC. When we foresee assigned engineers facing challenges solving a particular problem for a client, we bring in internal reinforcement, we bring engineers who are subject matter experts for that problem.

Codebase Assets:

Great software development outsourcing companies build their codebase assets to reduce time to market for their client’s products. Getting product launched with a development partner that has extensive codebase assets in the relevant field is far cost and time efficient than doing it internally with a small team.

Hourly rate is irrelevant:

Some Charge $100 an hour, some charge $40 per hour, some charge $20 per hour. But in our experience, standalone hourly rate is just irrelevant. Suppose, engineering team “A” charges $40/hour may complete your project in 100 hours using their codebase assets and vast experience and skills; while the same project may take up 500 hours for team “B” that charges $20/hour with lesser experience and expertise. Meaning team “A” at $40/hour will complete your project in $4,000; while team “B” at $20 per hour may take $10,000 to complete the same project. But let’s not just say that you can’t use a less capable or less expensive development team. Sometimes okay is OK. If you are primarily in a content business, and all you need is WordPress or content management system to pull in content, get it themed up and may be get a couple of plugins added, You can often work with the developers that have fewer capabilities and may be less expensive. But when you go from building a website to building a web application or mobile app, it usually requires higher skills. Try to map three things in relation to each other: 1- Hourly rate 2- Skills of the engineers and 3- Requirements of your project. Better software outsourcing partners will not only offer rates according to the skills of engineers engaged in your projects, but also guide you on what kind of skill-set should be engaged according to the complexity of the project.

Business Understanding

Your development team has to understand the problem you are trying to solve in a bigger context than just taking a set of requirements and implementing them. Most of the unanticipated issues come up while taking the requirements and turning them into a code without having any understanding of the business and value proposition for the end user. It’s particularly important to give your development team a real sense of product and business so that you can have a meaningful discussions and debates about how you should actually be solving the problems rather than just asking them to go write the code. Partner with company who are willing to understand your unique business and value proposition in depth as if it is their own business.

Agile Methodologies:

We recommend to partner up with a team that understands and have ability to implement Agile Methodologies. Agile has great benefits, and below are some of the most important in our view.