5 Must-Follow Rules When Hiring a Mobile Remote Dev Team

Outsourcing your software development offers you significant benefits, but there are risks as well. When you don’t plan for risks, you invite damage and failure. Here is how to make it right.

Before you start any remote process, you must protect yourself against loss. Risk management starts with a Non-Disclosure Agreement to avoid the loss of proprietary information to a third-party company. Because there is always a possibility of meeting a team that will want to take advantage of your ideas, you should understand the benefits and demerits of outsourcing your software development as you hire vendors for your project.

So, before moving on to the must-have rules of outsourcing your software development, it is worth mentioning some basic tips that will make the selection process easier for you. They can help find the right service provide, getting maximal benefits from your efforts.

Choosing your remote partner

· Clearly define your business objectives and goals. Specify what you want, what you expect from the provider, and what you want to achieve. Although simple, this critical activity will help ensure that you are on the right path.

• Check up on the experience of your partner. This involves learning more about the technologies available, dev platforms, and other key competencies the candidate has.

• Look at work samples by having the devs present works that are most related to your own project or just the best ones they can showcase.

• Check devs’ communication practices. For example, by schedule an interview to ensure that communication will be effortless and easy no matter what.

• Consider the developers’ overall management values and work attitudes.

• Learn as much as possible about their dev process. This includes asking for information in regards to how they have set up their development process and how you can check up on progress.

• Determine is the dev team ready and willing to sign NDA or IP agreement.

• Confirm the responsibilities of each party in the project in terms of bug fixing, ongoing support and others. What will be free (usually bugs fixing is free) and what will you pay for.

This is just a ballpark recommendations list, so you can add any particular requirements important to you and your business. Even though technology does make it easy to find remote devs, the process can still be difficult. It doesn’t matter whether you are comfortable working with an individual or a remote team, but you should be sure that you are working with the right people.

In other words, you cannot rush your decision making process because this can greatly influence how your project rolls out. Your software outsource development experience will run as smoothly as possible only after your carefully consider the external and internal factors as well as the specifics of your project.

The 5 Must-Have Rules to Follow

Regrettably, the many misconceptions surrounding software development outsourcing have seen many businesses and entrepreneurs waste time and money they can’t afford. What you want is a software dev team that is focused on helping your business reach its full potential by building intuitive mobile apps and strong web platforms.

Here are the critical rules that you should follow, in no particular order:

1. Fixed Price model — be aware.

Based on the specifications you provided in the beginning of the project, the fixed price model sets a fixed budget. You pay exactly what is in the contract, no matter how much time the developers take.

As you run your business, you have to watch the fast-paced software market for trends and be flexible if you want to succeed. Expect your specs to change, and they will. If you find yourself in a locked contract that offers a defined scope of work, project specs, and terms, any changes you request will have you back sitting at the price negotiation phase. This can stall progress, and if this happens frequently, it is likely to harm the relationship. A fixed price model is not suitable for startups because change happens constantly. Startups adjust direction regularly, adopting new technologies and improving rapidly, so should their end products.

In addition, the fixed price model is more expensive than other models. A service provider will always look for a means of accounting for possible risks in their fixed price estimate. Since they are not familiar with your technology and niche, they will apply premiums to the known and unknown so as not to lose on the fixed price estimate. It is good to be confident about the future, but there are ways to keep calm.

A good idea is to request a “test drive” for two weeks before you commit fully. Thus you spend a little and validate the dev team.

2. Be Involved

For your product to succeed, it is critical that you get involved with your in-house or offshore dev team. Carry out due diligence and interview every developer you want to recruit yourself or have someone in your firm do it for you. It is important that your service provider understands your business. Proper engagement from both sides, in combination with regular communication, will get you better results. Building solutions together is what makes them masterpieces.

3. Watch out for signs of bad communication

Good communication is key to the success of your project. Ensure that the provider’s project manager knows their developers well and that your in-house product owner or manager has a clear vision of what your product should achieve. These are key people in the project, so they should have open communication channels that they use frequently and properly.

Communication also includes detailed and transparent reporting. Your project manager should not forget to make daily or weekly reports, or give early notification in case of missed deadlines. When you think there are no problems, it simply means that you are not aware of them. You don’t want to lose contact or leave the development unattended.

If the project manager is frequently unavailable or not returning your calls, this is a sign you should notice. It may be time to change service providers. If you are getting bad signals, you cannot rely on time to make communication better — it often never does.

4. Protect your information assets

When outsourcing to remote dev team, one of the biggest concerns for entrepreneurs is protecting your intellectual property. Follow these three simple rules on protecting your idea, and you can rest easy:

• Make sure the Non-Disclosure Agreement is part of the contract you sign with the service provider.

• Learn more about what the service provider has put in place to protect your source code and rights. This can include ensuring that all code is in a secure and safe globally accessible repository like GitLab/GitHub, and that devs use Jira, Asana or Trello for daily work on your project.

• Sign an Intellectual Property Rights agreement that the source code remains your sole property. You can find this agreement as part of the main contract you sign with the service provider.

• Conduct a due diligence audit on the provider to discover and confirm their best practices.

5. Keep core expertise in-house

Keeping core expertise in-house is important for many businesses, especially startups. It is also true that many routine development duties that require a lot of effort have nothing to do with core expertise. As you offload some of these tasks to a third-party, you are simply saving your best in-house talent for creating more value for your efforts.

However, as you develop the core parts of your product or add innovative features, a better approach would be to keep this development phase in-house. As an alternative, some businesses, struggling with the recruitment of high caliber developers locally, choose to relocate the service provider’s star developer to their offices. However, this requires setting up an appropriate agreement, some legal input, and relocation expenses. In a majority of cases, this can be a cheaper and much faster approach compared to putting together an entire team of the same quality locally.

Conclusion

These five must-follow rules allow business owners and entrepreneurs to develop amicable and productive relationships based on trust-building and mutual respect with an outsourcing software development company. The better you manage such relationships, the more likely you will be positioned to release better, more creative products more efficiently and quickly than before.

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