When it comes to offshore software development teams, managing quality and risk creates value. But you also need experienced leadership and oversight for long-term success. Simply adding offshore bodies to a project rarely works, and has diminishing returns.
Here are some process tips for mitigating risk and getting the most value from an offshore team.
- Also leverage an onshore development partner for leadership and critical systems design. They can create and direct strategy, ensure developers follow patterns, address compliance and security concerns, and perform code reviews to ensure quality. They can also write better code faster, which best suits critical systems development. This is what we do at Fynydd and it works.
- If possible, your offshore team should mirror your operating hours. Otherwise communications, troubleshooting, and overall progress will lag. It can be beneficial to have expanded availability for handling off-hour requests, but that means the offshore team needs decision-making authority. Otherwise someone in the organization will also need to be available during those hours.
- Try to get dedicated resources for the long term. When there are offshore staff changes, require that they fully train the replacement(s) before additional staff are brought in. It takes time! New developers, even when they are superstars, need to learn a platform's ins-and-outs before they can meaningfully contribute.
- Be explicit about who is running the project, give them the appropriate decision-making authority, and enforce a workflow that puts them between ideas and action. Ideally this would be a lead developer from your onshore partner.
- If the offshore team has novice developers or otherwise low-performers, make sure they are in a learning role and not expected to work on key infrastructure.
- Perform code reviews. Bad or inefficient code should not be tolerated and is a learning experience that can make your offshore team better.
- Rely on your lead development partner to facilitate communication. If you find it difficult to communicate with your offshore team, your lead development partner has experience in picking up the nuance, including technical jargon that's hard to understand in any language.
Avoiding The Big Problems
Some of the issues you'll encounter can be avoided by engaging with an onshore development partner. Here are some tips for keeping the app or service quality high and the risk low.
- A proper architecture and coding patterns are critical to long-term success. Without a good evolving architecture and consistent coding patterns maintenance is difficult, code readability suffers, and security vulnerabilities are harder to avoid.
- Compliance is a bear, even with experienced developers. This can range from ensuring organization brand standards, to complying with regional legal requirements (like GDPR), and avoiding copyright violations. There needs to be a focus on these concerns which yields appropriate strategies and resolutions on a consistent basis.
- Bad code quality is a risk. It's not just about performance and user experience. Bad code could leak information or have vulnerabilities. It could allow bad actors to misuse your app or service. Worse yet, it could facilitate the abuse of your customers.
- A focus on security is not optional. Properly securing an app or service requires a development team that not only has a security focus, but also the experience and awareness required to implement and maintain a solid security posture. The team members have to be vetted resources with no geopolitical encumbrances and a level of trust commensurate with the app or service in question. For example, bank or government clients may require background checks.
- Maintaining intellectual capital is crucial. You invested time and money into building a knowledge base as well as an app or service. You need to ensure that the knowledge gained building your app or service will not vanish into the ether.
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