Offshore Software Development: A Complete Guide

Getting Your Company Ready for Offshore Software Development

We already discussed where and how to find an outsourcing software development company that will be ready to help you, but is your organization ready for this type of cooperation? Let’s discuss what you can do for the smoothest workflow. 

Define Offshoring Scope

The first thing you need to decide is what you need to outsource and to what extent. It is important to analyze your organization to know its strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Sometimes, you might not need an outsourcing company or offshore partner at all, and hiring just a few experts via a staff augmentation arrangement will be just enough. 

As a business owner, you must have a clear understanding of whether adding particular experts to separate departments in your organization will be enough, or whether delegating a considerable part of your business responsibilities to an offshore development company is essential for the future growth of your organization.

So, the real question is, “How much responsibility are you willing to delegate to another offshore or outsourcing software development company?” 

While creating a software product, you have to cover:

• Software development
• Testing
• Design
• Business analysis
• Marketing needs

So, you need to decide how far you are willing to go with trusting another company in some, or in all of these areas.

Olexandr Boyko

Delivery Director at SPD Technology

“From our experience, one of the most common and effective approaches is when companies outsource the entire software development process offshore, including product management and marketing. This approach allows you to control the product development process more efficiently, as compared with product ownership delegation. However, on the development side, you may then need Business Analysts (BAs) and Project Managers (PMs) to make sure that everything goes according to plan and your project vision.

We also had projects where the entire product was created by our teams, while the client took care of the marketing activities and overall direction in accordance with their high-level vision. This approach is also a viable option if you find a trusted and experienced partner.”

 

Appoint a Product Owner

It is necessary to have a Product Owner for any scenario of cooperation with an outsourcing company. Even with the best team of seasoned offshore developers who can quickly begin and deliver results, it will still be wise to control the direction of your product development. Some companies, especially startups, focus on development speed so much that they lose direction. You need someone to make sure that your top-notch product is being created to solve real-life problems, and that this is being done in accordance with your initial vision.

It is obvious that one of the biggest challenges with any team of outside experts is that they struggle to understand the real problems of your company and thereby offer viable solutions. It is also obvious that outsiders will not have the same understanding of your internal processes as the people in your company. The nuances of your business context are the most difficult to reflect properly in the documentation because this kind of knowledge is often unstructured. However, with the right partner and a properly set-up communication process, this challenge is completely solvable. In fact, when you outsource the entire product ownership, you have to find a way to share your business vision to develop a product the way you want it to be.

You could share the context and provide your offshore development team with a deeper understanding of your organization. Great product ownership and communication are a major part of delivering this understanding to the fullest extent. A Product Owner on your side can bridge the gap between the external and internal teams by being fully aware of both the business and development aspects.

The responsibilities of a Product Owner include, but are not limited to:

• Defining and prioritizing the product backlog
• Understanding stakeholders’ needs
• Setting product vision and strategy
• Release planning
• User story creation
• Acceptance and validation of user stories
• Measurement of product success
• Budget management.

Ensure Remote Cooperation Readiness

Your organization must be able to welcome an extended team of experts and provide them with all the necessary resources and communication tools without causing any disruptions to your processes.

Your organization must be digitalized to the maximum extent, allowing effective online communication and collaboration. If you still have any key processes that rely on in-person meetings, physical signatures, or any other processes that cannot be digitized, your company is not ready for a software outsourcing arrangement. You need to take care of your internal processes before adding any external teams.

In addition to supporting your teams with all the necessary tools, your Management must clear any communication roadblocks and make their virtual board meetings secure. Eliminating all bottlenecks that prevent your company from effective offshoring cooperation is a benefit in itself, even if you don’t cooperate with a software development partner as yet. Digital transformation will improve your processes, saving your employees’ working time and thereby saving you money.

Manage Access and Permissions

Your system must be able to provide different levels of permissions to different user groups.

While outsourcing or offshoring your software development, you will face situations when limited permissions will be required for users to solve certain problems. Every system is unique. Some systems may already be able to provide such permissions by using some other existing software solutions, while others may have a single administrator role that is designed to grant only the “all or nothing” kind of access.

So, it is recommended that you implement a multi-role user hierarchy with varying permissions to ensure productive collaboration with your external teams. In fact, flexible access and permissions functionality are a must-have for large enterprises, while for smaller organizations, this can be an option that is worth considering.

Identify Dependencies

In addition to taking into account the implementation of flexible access and varying permissions for your external teams, it is also important to determine the dependencies inside your organization that may potentially block the operations of an external team. 

An example of dependency can be when two different tasks for an in-house and outsource team require the same resources while there aren’t enough resources to do the tasks at the same time, making one task dependent on the other. 

When you identify all the dependencies, you will be able to rule out the possibility of your departments’ activities blocking your external team.

Prepare Security Measures

If you have never used any external help before, some parts of your infrastructure, security-wise, can suit only your in-house team. Therefore, your security model must be reconsidered and readjusted for outsourcing cooperation to keep your project safe. 

The most common practices for remote teams are:

• To always use a VPN.
• To work only with software that is recommended and pre-installed by your security department.

Get Your Team Ready

Despite the practice of using offshore software development services is quite common,  some concerns regarding job security still may arise among your in-house team members. So, when you have an in-house team but need to scale your project development by setting up a dedicated team or ODC offshore, you keep in mind that you also have to provide your internal team members with the context for hiring remote experts. 

Addressing the interaction between in-house and remote teams is equally important. While your in-house team members may be protective of some technologies and approaches they are used to, your responsibility is to facilitate communication and offer the correct perspective to your in-house team members. Ensuring both in-house and offshore teams feel valued  fosters a collaborative environment, enhancing results and minimizing potential conflicts.