Development Outsourcing Best Practices: Three Ways to Outsource Smarter with an Agile Development Partner

Making the decision to outsource your software development makes good business sense. Yet turning one of your most important business assets over to an offshore business partner can be a daunting task—and choosing the right overseas developer can make the difference between business success and financial catastrophe. The challenges are clear; cultural differences, geography, language barriers and varying time zones. So how do you ensure software development outsourcing success with so many hurdles to overcome?

The answer lies in the power of the agile software development to maximize the benefits of offshore collaboration, while minimizing the risks to your reputation and your bottom line. Following are three business benefits to choosing an agile offshore software developer for your business.

More Collaboration for Less Development Risk

An agile offshore development partner will build a collaborative development environment that most likely includes open office space that promotes face-to-face collaboration between individual developers and between teams. This promotes problem solving and process adaptability throughout the development process. Problems can be solved as they arise—and before they can become production delays or quality issues. This minimizes your chances of losing time and money to bottlenecks and miscommunication. It also assures that your offshore partner can satisfy your process requirements quickly and easily—regardless of your time zone—and without missing your delivery dates.    

Smarter Workflows that Increase Production

Working with an agile software development partner gives you the advantage of more productivity with fewer quality issues. Agile developers are trained to complete short-term goals on a task-by-task basis. Work is broken up into small stages with each stage being completed in short time spans. There are quality checks at the end of each stage so problems can be fixed before they get too deep into the process. With quality checks happening at regular intervals, you’re less likely to be caught off guard by major software flaws that can shake your confidence in your developer and cost you time and money. 

Targeted Teams to Ensure Maximum Software Quality

An agile offshore development partner will use teamwork to your advantage. Agile developers are trained to ensure that you have the right talent on each team to produce the best quality software in a highly efficient manner.

In agile practice, each team member contributes to each project based on his or her best suited abilities for that particular job. A developer who takes on a certain task may not perform the same task on a different project. This ensures that you have the right talent for the job at hand at every stage of the development process—from project managers to QA testers. As a result, software bugs are less likely and your business benefits from the having highly capable resources dedicated to ensuring your success every step of the way.