Giuseppe Avagliano
Aug 11, 2021 • 5 min read
Employees or Consultants? Which are the pros and cons of the outsourcing of software development?
Which is the best? Fear of losing control over your product, but also lack of local expertise. The cost difference between local and offshore employees, also the remote workforce management challenges.
Most of the time when an entrepreneur decides to develop software, the challenge to decide if the development should be outsourced to nearshore or offshore software development company versus the possibility to hire in-house developers, becomes a true dilemma because a wrong choice could lead to waste of budget and time.
Both approaches have several pros and cons, but at the end of the day, as we will try to analyze through this article, the solution is always to be investigated between finding the right, motivated, talented, sufficiently experienced resources that could embrace the company goals and develop a high-end product.
Outsourcing of Software is the process of subcontracting work to an external company or individual.
It is very popular in the business world because it can help companies save money, increase efficiency, and meet deadlines. Many companies are outsourcing as it has become more affordable in recent years due to globalization.
Some companies now outsource for many different aspects of their business including design, programming, engineering, customer service and support, research, and development where they have a shortage of skills internally.
Outsourcing of software nowadays is also unfortunately paired with the concept of cheapness, literally making many digital entrepreneurs around the world considering this option only to save-up money, forgetting several advantages that should not be underestimated, such as having the opportunity to work immediately with professionals, more experienced, more trained to the software development process, that could potentially know how to develop a certain new feature or integrate a third-party library just because they already did it in the past or could recognize a pattern used elsewhere before.
This happens due to many years of bad outsourcing services coming from several places of the world, where an entire army of switchers, non-educated developers, most of the time scammers faked their skills as engineers following a catastrophic learn-by-doing approach.
The truth is that world of consulting evolved, and now many teams around the world, in particular small-medium enterprises, learned how to team up with customers and product owners to grow together, in an end-to-end close collaboration via Agile workflow management tools, video-conference tools, and documentation platform could fill the lack of communication gap providing both sides with a pleasant working experience.
Software Outsourcing can be risky as much as hiring unmotivated in-house developers or be affected by the same communication delay and efficiency of having a remote in-house developer.
If you hire a team or a company without really understanding their achievement on the market, successful case studies, proven experience adopting a certain technology stack, other customers and partners feedback, you’ll probably risk being at the same place, the year after, without a product, with a curtailed budget with your competitors 1 year stronger than you.
This is because, without any accurate research, eventually some in-house experience to appropriately evaluate the collaboration, you might end up not being able to control the quality of the work for sure, accept or argue on modules estimations and validate the product once a new release is ready to reach the market.
Most of the challenges of the outsourcing of software are also given by cultural differences in communication, or education, where terms like software engineering, quality assurance, security standards could have different meanings for professionals around the world.
Most of our Norwegian, Danish, Swisse, and British partners and customers in the years, hardly complained about software outsourcing in India or Pakistan due to these reasons.
Project Managers and software engineers use to leverage these issues by adopting Agile Methodologies, following precise practices from most known SCRUM and Kanban, or as we use to do in Lasting Dynamics also inheriting experimental but very successful precepts from Shu-Ha-Ri, Japanese agile methodology that brings notion about mentorships in a team, emulation until the point a junior-intermediate profile could start to lead and be in charge of some duties, or the much more known OKRs approach, that nested with FDD ( Feature Driven Development ) or a SCRUMBAN methodology could provide a fully optimized working environment with a continuative workflow that ranges from product owners to projects managers, UIUX designers, developers, and quality assurance engineers.
You might want to learn more about www.roundrush.com the workflow management system free to use platform, developed by us that encapsulated all these practices in one tool, that aims to teach developers around the world how to work together in a team to develop only quality software and high-end products.
The first quality to look for when hiring developers is technical knowledge.
The developer should be familiar with the programming language that you will be using and should have experience in the field of application that you are building the program for.
This rule is definitely not applied to niche technology, in that case, you might want an experienced intermediate-senior either back-end or front-end developer spending some relevant amount of time to read the official documentation and practice with the new technology so that later they could start to proficiently implement solutions using it.
The second quality that you should look for is skillset versatility.
A developer should be able to take on different tasks such as software design and coding,
in particular, both ends developers should understand design patterns in the specific technology, have a true understanding of major software architectures such as client-server ( most used when developing web and mobile applications ) or MVC ( model-view-controller ) that is still very used from server-side frameworks such as Express, Nest, Laravel or Django.
The third major package of qualities you are looking for is good English communication, a sense of duty and honesty, loyalty, and transparency!
If you are struggling to try to understand what to do next, it’s probably because you are lacking tech expertise, and this is also what might lead to a failure.
In the end, it’s a matter of people; people make difference, regardless they are hired as consultants or as employees - this comparison belongs to the past - what is instead truly important for a digital entrepreneur to understand is that quality is the real way to save up money, and quality is the only way in software development.
There would be much more to say about it, for example how the Academy process could help you find talented and educated developers, or how a well-structured quality assurance process could be a keystone, for all of these reasons, we strongly suggest and invite you to book a call with us, since 30 minutes of an exploratory call with an experienced engineer might save up your next 12 months of development! ⇒ https://www.lastingdynamics.com/book-a-call/
Giuseppe Avagliano
Giuseppe is a Marketing expert with 10 years of experience in international media companies and e-commerce. He is passionate about everything that concerns technology, ranging between advertising, smartphones, computers, Cryptos, and NFTs. For sure, there is more coffee than water in his veins but still thinks that calm is the virtue of the strong.
