You obviously know the benefits of setting up your own software development team in India. In case, my assumption is wrong, you can learn here first and then continue reading this article to get a deep insight into the next and very important step, HOW?
Important boxes to tick while setting up your own India software development team
- Your offshore tech partner fully understands your business requirements
The very first step before team recruitment and selection is to establish if your Indian offshore tech partner has a crystal clear understanding of your business requirements, vision and culture. Once you’re fully satisfied with their understanding of your software development project, you can choose one of the engagement models based on your project scope: Fixed Price model or Time and Material (T&M) model.
- A transparent hiring model for recruitment
A transparent hiring model keeps you rest assured of hiring the right talent for your project. A good transparent hiring model should comprise one-on-one interviews, running a test series, giving some real project tasks for two to three days, etc., in order to gauge the right skill-set required for desirable deliverables. Remember, a transparent hiring model allows you to make a confident decision and complete the hiring process on a satisfactory note.
- Low cost of evaluation
Go for a tech partner that starts small and builds fast so that you can quickly evaluate the effort made and decide if it’s worth continuing with the team or not. Getting your team working on multiple modules for six or more weeks and then delivering for evaluation could do more harm than good. What if you realize 6 weeks after the point of inception that your software development team just don’t have what you need for successful completion of your project. It’s not just a waste of time, but of your money as well.
Cost of evaluation becomes a grave concern especially for startups and SMEs that often have budget constraints. Also, having to look for a new team after six or more long weeks and then again going for evaluation for another six weeks could be like stepping into a quagmire. To avoid this predicament, you can simply ask your tech partner to get the team working on only one or two modules and deliver a weekly or bi-weekly release. This way you can evaluate faster and save both time and money going forward in the product development process.
For a new software product, going for a minimum viable product (MVP) is always a good idea to test your assumptions much earlier in the product development cycle. An ideal tech partner should make the MVP ready within 9-12 weeks with basic features and once the product is caught on, start developing additional features that are good to have. This way you can also incorporate customer feedback and other learnings much faster and raise the bars of user experience to get a competitive edge.
- Quality Assurance
Yes, low labor cost is at the core of why most businesses work with software developers in India. But, it’s more important to ensure that low cost must not compromise on product quality. Ask your tech partner if they have built-in testing processes to perform different tests (automation testing will be an added advantage for faster releases) throughout the development cycle for quality product delivery at every release. Also, if they can bring on-board not just QAs but tech leads and SMEs as well to do code review before creating test instances for your onsite team. Setting up a team like that saves the headache in the long run.
- Time zone difference must not hinder communication
Working with a remote team in India could be challenging if there’s a time zone difference. You need to give feedback from time to time, discuss sprints and plan daily tasks with your offshore team to get the project head in the right direction at all times. For that to happen, it’s paramount that there’s no communication gap with your team because of the time-zone difference. Go for a tech partner that has flexible working hours and conducts daily/weekly meetings.
Also, ask for a dedicated account manager to do regular Pulse Check twice a month. This will help your tech partner know if you’re satisfied with the way things are going and if not, then they will take corrective measures to be on the same page with you. Train the team to use the project management tool of your choice so that you can better track the productivity and quality levels and also generate accurate invoices.
- Intellectual property security
Intellectual property and data security become an obvious concern when working with a team sitting at a very different corner of the world. To put those concerns to rest, ask your tech partner to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). That way you can ensure that your IP like source code and all belong only to you and no one else uses it unethically to start their own business. It’s also a good idea to get your tech partner to sign a non-compete agreement. Digital data is always a subject to hack, so make sure that latest security protocols are being followed for data transmission and sharing by your remote team.
- Skilled resources on need basis
For many projects, it’s not possible to predict all the requirements upfront. As the project requirements may change, it’s important that your tech partner has the provision for providing more skilled resources as and when needed. If not, you will have to face the trouble of finding more resources with another tech partner located at a different place. Handling two teams in different time zones or even in the same time zone will only add to the burden and make it difficult for you to focus on the most important task, i.e. growing your business. Therefore, your tech partner should have enough resources to meet your project requirements from time to time.
- Significant infrastructure
For an offshore partnership to be successful, Infrastructure setup plays a vital role. Your ideal tech partner should provide you with a private office with high and all-time Internet connectivity. Team availability for overlap working hours also forms an important part of infrastructure setup. Ergonomic workstations are good to go for as they further boost productivity and creativity. With the wide availability of ISP, cellular networks and latest technologies in major towns and cities of India, the right infrastructure setup for your IT project is not much of a concern. Nonetheless, it’s an important box to get ticked before you begin proceedings to avoid communication issues and hiccups in the software development cycle.
Now that you know the points to keep in mind while setting up your own India software development team, I would like to introduce Evon Technologies, an offshore software development company in India, that has been successfully catering to a wide range of technology needs of several businesses for over a decade now.
Why choose Evon?
Evon not just helps you with software development, but provides software consulting services as well to get you ahead in the right direction from the outset and swiftly meet ever-changing market demands. With its proven excellence in using latest technologies and providing highly innovative solutions for over a decade now, you can bank on Evon for hiring a tech team for all your software development needs. You can also check out case studies to see how Evon has helped meet complex technology requirements of several businesses.
If there’s still something that’s keeping you on the fence, get in touch with us, and we will hear everything that would help us understand your business, and then get back to you with the best solutions for your tech requirements. Evon has constantly evolved over the years as a technology partner and stands committed in its endeavour to help businesses (be it a startup, SMEs or an established Enterprise) by providing highly innovative tech solutions at a market-competitive cost.
