Tag: software development challenges
How CEOs Can Gain Value from Software Development Outsourcing
In-house creation of a complete and sophisticated software application requires large amounts of resources and time. Maintaining an in-house team amid the coronavirus lockdowns has added to this and become increasingly complex. Frankly, in these turbulent economic times, software development outsourcing can prove more profitable to your business than ever before.
Software development outsourcing offers limitless possibilities to CEOs. As the world is connected by the power of the internet, you can access the talent you would normally be hard-pressed to find. Additionally, finding an expert offshore software development company that meets your fast-approaching deadlines is another benefit.
As CEO of your company, before you take full advantage of software development outsourcing, you need to know how you can leverage outsourcing effectively. Here is a comprehensive guide that will help you understand various aspects of the offshore software development process and prepare you to face the challenges it can bring your way.
Does Your Business Need Offshore Software Development?
For most businesses, hiring an offshore development partner’s services has helped them breathe easy and take the load off their shoulder. Here are a few scenarios where the offshore software development model will prove to be the best solution for your company.
1. Do you require talent with narrow expertise?
Software development outsourcing improves the quality of your team as it gives you access to a vast talent pool with narrow specialization. Such resources allow you to leverage both international perspectives and onboard the best talent.
2. Do you need to scale your team?
If you lack an excellent in-house team that can undertake multiple projects simultaneously, it is time to consider offshore software development. This allows you to scale up your team of experts without spending a fortune or risking output quality.
3. Do you want to concentrate on your product?
Software development outsourcing can help you automate most mundane operations such as payroll and accounting. This will help you concentrate on the growth of your company and innovation.
Read more: Offshoring Software Development: Here’s All You Need to Know
Advantages of Software Development Outsourcing
Software development outsourcing can help your company experience higher production levels without spending too much money or energy. Partnering with the offshore software development team will help you carry out temporary tasks, improve the pace of your growth, and reduce your labor costs. In other words, it gives your company a much-coveted competitive advantage by improving customer service while ensuring limited-budget product quality. Here are some specific benefits of offshore software development.
1. Saves costs
Cost-saving is one of the most significant benefits of software development outsourcing. Whether you want to scale up your employees or scale down, outsourcing a whole project is much cheaper than hiring each developer separately. The difference in salaries across the globe can save you millions of dollars. Offshore development allows you to get the same amount of work done, with the same quality, in the same amount of time at a much lesser cost as different countries have different living costs. For example, the average offshore software development rate in India per hour is $30, whereas, in the USA, the hourly developer rate will cost around $100.
2. Flexibility
Once you offshore your development requirements, you do not have to spend time recruiting, training, and housing new employees. Besides, it is impossible and impractical to hire a full-time in-house contractor for your short-term projects. Software development outsourcing gives you the option of choosing developers for a single project. You can find talent that fits perfectly without investing in a permanent position. This will give your core team some relief as they can concentrate on mission-critical activities essential to run the company and focus on the development process.
3. Saves time
Offshore software development relieves you from searching for new developers and preparing them to suit your needs. It can also improve speed to market as it helps your management and key employees to focus on the core business. Since it can eliminate secondary tasks, you can redistribute your services for more essential aspects of the organization.
4. Centered approach
One of the most competitive advantages is the ability to have a focused strategy. If the in-house team needs to deal with several projects simultaneously, they may be forced to compromise on quality. However, Software development outsourcing can streamline your business process. This will allow your employees to take a centered approach and produce high-quality output within the set timelines.
5. Technological advantages
Businesses seeking to gain a competitive advantage will develop cutting-edge innovations using the latest technologies without expending an additional amount of time and resources in learning them themselves. This is possible when they team up with strategic offshore development partners with a proven track record.
6. Compensate for the lack of in-house experience
Software development outsourcing can bring in additional knowledge and power to reach your business goals. Outsourcing offers the flexibility to use your resources where there is a need as it allows you to scale up or scale down as required. It means that you can either let go of certain talent in one field while allowing you to quickly add specialists to your pool of experts in another field. You can employ a team of varying size, complexity, and cost. Such a team will be able to find optimal solutions contributing to the growth of your company.
Read more: Why Software Development Outsourcing is a Smart Move Now
Best practices to follow while offshoring software development
Here are a few points to consider when you decide to outsource your software development project:
- Get introduced to all the developers who are supposed to work on your project.
- Ensure to have a full-time on-shore lead and an offshore lead to help establish necessary coding standards, solve technical issues, and mentor the offshore team.
- Use video conferencing to arrange regular meetings to handle any problems and resolve the same in a timely and efficient manner.
- Use appropriate tracking tools (project management tools) to plan tasks efficiently and prioritize work accordingly.
Read more: Selecting the Right Engagement Model for Business Software Development
Offshore Software Development with Fingent
Since 2003, Fingent has been a reliable and capable offshore partner for leading global brands, including many Fortune 500 companies. With an impeccable track record as an offshore software development team, Fingent has helped improve cash flow and increase business efficiency for many clients. We help your organization scale up as required without the need to hire or fire any of your team members.
Our diverse offshore talent pool includes experienced developers and tech professionals who leverage the latest software development trends, such as automation, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), 3D Web Configurator, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Mobile application development (native, hybrid), Microsoft solutions, SAP solutions, and so on.
Our experts are available to provide you with inputs on your project. Let’s get talking and find out which process fits your project.
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Enterprise software is in the midst of a golden run now, as more and more enterprises seek to ride the digital and mobility wave to improved efficiency and success. However, rolling out enterprise software is fraught with many challenges.
Here are the top challenges to overcome, to ensure the success of enterprise software.
- Reconciling with the Changing IT Infrastructure Landscape
IT is always in a state of continuous churn. What is trendy tomorrow may be out of favour, and even obsolete in a few weeks. What was touted as the bright new thing may soon fade off as a false start, with HTML5 being a case in point. In such a state of affairs, enterprise software developers are hard pressed to retain relevance amidst the changing IT infrastructure landscape.
The obvious solution is to future-proof the application, but there is no clear-cut answer on how.
A solution finding increasing number of takers is low-code platforms. Enterprise app developers have long discovered custom code as costly, time-consuming to develop, and difficult to maintain or make changes. In contrast, low-code application platforms reduce the quantum of hand-coding, not just accelerating the process, but also enabling fast reconfiguration of apps, quick modification of logic flows, and rapid delivery of new UI elements, as needed. Co-opting new features and integrations become a piece of cake, sans sizable investment in infrastructure.
- Relevance in an Extremely Fluid Business Environment
Side by side with the changes in the IT infrastructure landscape, the business environment also remains extremely fluid. What was a pressing need at the time of conceptualization may already have become obsolete by the time the software rolls out.
In such a scenario, trying to get everything right in one go is a sure recipe for disaster. A far better approach is to undertake small, iterative releases. Such releases make it easy to make changes, and also offer valuable learning experiences that facilitate continuous improvements.
- Challenges of Integration
While coding takes up a significant chunk of the time, it is just the easy part. Prototyping, designing the user experience and user interface, testing the application on different devices, organizing and running field trials, figuring out how to deploy the application in legacy systems, how to integrate the app with the CRM, ERP or other running systems, how to migrate the data, and how to safeguard the migrated data are all just as important, and take up significant chunk of time as well.
There is no shortcut to resolve integration challenges. The best approach is a thorough planning phase, where all possible issues are foreseen and solutions provided.
- Data Migration Challenges
Instances of the application development team, having completed the project, patting themselves on their back, oblivious to the challenges ahead, are all too common.
The real challenge starts when trying to get the software up and running, and among the key challenge is data migration.
Data may reside in disparate legacy repositories and may be non-compatible with the new system. There may not be any business of validation rules in place to determine the process of migration. Many companies fail to undertake an as-is assessment, to understand the quality of the data, before starting the data migration job. Such an assessment identifies what is missing, and enable companies to assess the work required to migrate the legacy data successfully.
- The Challenge of Costs v/s Expectation Trade-Off
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. While there are no limits on imagination and intentions, often considerations of cost bring in a reality check. The practical approach to enterprise application development is to make a trade-off between cost and functionality, to strike an optimal balance.
Nevertheless, often the cost required to roll out enterprise software is grossly underestimated, more so with the case of mobile software. The biggest distortion is in maintenance, with the need to push updates at regular intervals to cope with the ever-changing landscape. The maintenance cost of a software application over its lifetime will almost certainly overshadow the initial development costs.
- Change Management Challenges
The development team may have just resolved all the technical challenges, be it the product simply not installing, data migration, and everything else. But if the inevitable resistance to change is not factored in, it isn’t over yet.
A big reason for resistance is not involving stakeholders, especially end users in the development or procurement process. Managing resistance to change, and also rolling out an optimal app requires involving stakeholders, including end users, early in the development process.Take suggestions on what to include, build prototypes, and seek feedback. If end users and all stakeholders feel they have a stake in the new software and were instrumental in its development, they would consider it as their baby and support it.
Users may feign compliance if a new suit is imposed by dint of authority, but they would almost certainly run to the IT team for the flimsiest of reasons.Trying to impose a half-baked software just makes it worse.
- Challenges Related to Feedback-Development Loop
Change management gets even more complicated than involving the stakeholders. Even without resistance, end users would have a lot of feedback on usability issues or some requirement missing. Conversely, there could be some unnecessary features.
Enterprise software development is a continuous process, rather than an on-off project. The feedback from one iteration constitutes the basis for the next wave of improvements, and added functionality, with the cycle continuing.
Trying to develop everything in-house is foolhardy. Many web applications require obvious skills such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Many enterprises are mistaken into thinking these are the only skills required, and their in-house team would be able to handle it. Just because someone has the raw technical skills, it doesn’t make them competent to adapt the same easily, to new domains. Your best approach is to partner with us, to gain the advantage of our wide experience, and availability of a wide talent pool, competent in various situations and approaches.