3 Non-Technical Things to be considered
· What business goals do you want to accomplish with this project?
Consider the following questions in relation to this software within your business:
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What is your long-term plan for maintaining or improving this application?
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What is your budget for this project?
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What do you want your team to learn from working with an external team?
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How high is the priority of this project within your company – in budget and time?
· What deadlines do you need to hit?
Plan your project in relation to your business:
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What times of the year are you busy?
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Do you attend any trade shows or conferences where you typically debut new features?
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Are you seeking outside investment any time soon?
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Are you planning any announcements in the future that depend upon certain application functionality?
· How many stakeholders are involved in this project? How are they involved?
It should not be surprising that the more stakeholders are involved in a development project, the slower moving the project becomes. While it’s important to make sure the necessary people are in the loop about what’s happening, it also helps to know who needs to actually be involved in certain steps.
If there are higher-level managers that need to know where the project is at, from a more zoomed-out perspective, coordinate with your outsourced development team to agree on how this will happen.
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Can these additional stakeholders sit in on monthly demonstrations?
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Should they receive weekly or monthly updates from the partner’s PM?
3 Technical Things to be considered
· If it's an existing software or website, What's your test coverage?
Are you operating on 80% or 10% test coverage on your software?
For starters, test coverage will be key in estimating work on your application. Any reputable development team will build new testing into your application through continuous integration, which may involve going back and patching existing gaps in test coverage for a more stable app going forward. Taking over an app or a website with less than stellar test coverage could double the time it takes to build new features.
· How is your application documented so far?
For example, do you have documentation on how to set up the app or software? In your early conversations with the team who will be working on your application, you'll likely field questions about the current state of the application's documentation.
· What technical choices have already been made if any?
If you have any tech-savvy team members who have begun working on this project, what technical decisions have they already made for this application? This may be framework choice, hosting choice, or third-party integrations for the application that have already been purchased.
While it may be early enough in the product development that certain decisions can be changed, it’s important to share these choices with your potential development team. If you’ve chosen a less-popular framework.
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Does your external development team have experience working in that framework?
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Have they integrated with your third-party tools before?
If you're in the process of considering outsourcing your web application development to an external team, the questions above will help you select the right dev partner and begin the relationship on the most positive note.
And of course, if you're looking for a new development team to handle your digital transformation, we'd love it if you consider our team. send us an email to info@darwoft.com to see if we might be a good fit.
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