Today we are living in such conditions when remote work and outsourcing in the IT industry have become a standard and nobody is surprised when developers stay at home and perform their job responsibilities without the necessity to change their pajamas. Many companies know that. And they can enjoy the benefits that are available thanks to the possibility to hire dedicated development teams instead of creating in-house software development departments or choose other outsourcing modes for establishing cooperation with remote programmers.
Nowadays when businesses are looking for the most appropriate answers to questions on how to hire software developers, fewer and fewer companies make a decision to initiate a traditional hiring process that will be expected to end with welcoming a new in-house team at the office. There are dozens of reasons why hiring a dedicated development team is the most feasible variant in a wide range of situations. And we are going to discuss this topic in our article.
Dedicated development team: Basic definition
Though there are a lot of talks about this cooperation model, quite often it happens that when a company has even already decided to hire dedicated development team, the management is not fully aware of all its peculiarities. Let’s put it simply. When you hire dedicated developers, actually you do not hire them. What does it mean? It means that you sign an agreement or a contract with an outsourcing agency and those developers and other specialists that will work on your project officially will be employees of this agency.
But this fact matters only when we are talking about your legal relationships with your programmers. In reality, they stay fully focused on your project and you are expected to treat them as your employees. However, there are some peculiarities. For example, they will work remotely and you won’t be responsible for many administrative and organizational tasks like paying salaries or filing any documents related to people’s sick leaves or vacations. But actually, these peculiarities look more like benefits, don’t they?
One of the most important things that you will have to do before you will be able to hire dedicated development team is to write the right requirements. An outsourcing agency will use these requirements as guidelines for finding candidates that will potentially join your team. For doing that, you need to estimate the complexity of your project as well as analyze its specificity in order to create a list of positions that you want to include in your team.
Typically dedicated software development teams consist of:
- frontend and backend developers;
- designers;
- QA specialists;
- testers;
- project managers.
The exact composition of your team and the number of team members will fully depend on your project. By the way, please, do not forget that dedicated development teams are easily scalable and very flexible. If your requirements change during the development process, the composition of your team can be changed without any issues.
When do you need to hire dedicated development team?
If we say that this cooperation model is a universal one and will suit everyone, it won’t be true. Of course, there are cases when it will be sensible and feasible to prefer other options. But let’s concentrate our attention on the cases when hiring dedicated development team is definitely a good solution.
Factors in favor of choosing a dedicated development team model:
- Long-term project
- Changing requirements
- Readiness to work with a remote team
- Small in-house team (lack of the necessary talents)
When you have a short-term project, it’s better to prefer another model or even work with freelancers. Please bear in mind that despite all the benefits of dedicated teams, the process of team creation may take some time as initially, your outsourcing partner needs to find candidates, and then you need to organize interviews and choose the best specialists.
How to organize your work with your dedicated developers
We’ve prepared some practical tips that are expected to greatly help you if you hire a dedicated development team.
- Clearly explain the goals of your project and what you expect to get from your team;
- Set up all the processes;
- Make sure that all team members have the necessary software tools and access to them. Here we are talking about communication and video conferencing tools like Slack, Skype, Discord, or Zoom, project management tools like Asana, Jira, or Taiga, knowledge bases like Confluence, Miro, Google Docs Microsoft 365, and file sharing systems like WeTranfer or Dropbox.
- Organize regular meetings (it can be a daily video call or you can choose another schedule);
- Share your feedback and motivate your team. Developers should understand what is done well and what should be improved. For them, it is very important to have a good understanding of your vision.
As you see, the work with dedicated developers is quite similar to the work with in-house specialists but you are free from various administrative tasks. And that’s definitely very convenient as it helps you to save time and money. But to enjoy all the advantages that this model can offer to businesses, first of all, it is vital to choose a reliable outsourcing partner. And we want to recommend you be very attentive when you make your choice.