Software Development Process

How To Build an App Development Team: What Can You Insource?

While I would love if every single company outsourced their application development to SmartLogic, there are some situations where outsourcing some or all application development is not the best decision. While I genuinely believe that outsourcing some development to the right firm can be an invaluable source of knowledge for any in-house team, sometimes that neither possible nor advisable.

SmartLogic How to build an App Development Team, insource

This article is part 2 in a 4-part series explaining (1) different approaches to building an app development team; and (2) what you should insource and outsource. In the previous article we discussed the constraints to consider when—and three different approaches to—building your app development team.

In this post we'll cover situations when it is likely best to completely insource app development.

You should insource all application development when:

  • Your team has extensive experience managing the software development process and hiring technical people.
    • Having a team member experienced in the development process and technical process will help ensure things go off without a hitch.
  • You have enough time to hire and ramp up developers.
    • It takes time to find the right talent. If you have time to dedicate to recruiting and onboarding then insourcing makes sense.
  • You are able to accurately predict your development needs.
    • When you have developers on the payroll you want them working to deliver features; you don't want developers "sitting on the bench" with nothing to do.
    • Similarly, a certain number of developers can only work a finite number of hours per week, which translates into only a certain amount of features being delivered on a weekly basis. If you are in control of your product releases and how many features you need delivered in a given period of time, then you can plan ahead for how many developers you will need to hire.

Even if you meet all of these requirements, it may still be helpful to hire an outside firm from time-to-time, even for a limited engagement, so that your team can experience a different way of looking at problems and opportunities. We've got your covered if you want to learn more about mixing in-house developers and an external dev firm

If you need to build a product quickly, outsourcing development might be better for you. Our previous post discusses when you should outsource app development.

Follow @smartlogic for our upcoming posts.

 

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About Yair Flicker

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