Software Development with Distributed Teams

These days people spend most of their time on their smartphones because almost everything can be done online. You can do your groceries, book a table at your favorite restaurant, rent a car and even hire a freelancer online. No wonder even the smallest businesses invest in software, web development. If everything is done properly, you can reach your target audience with your website or an app and increase your sales significantly.

Software Development Costs

On the other hand, software development can be quite expensive and time-consuming. Even if you need a simple website, you would have to hire, at least one web developer. For better results, you would also want to have a UI/UX designer on your project add someone to take care of QA. In case you need to build a desktop or mobile application, you would need a software development team to get things done properly and meet your deadlines. It would also take some time to find and onboard different types of specialists and provide them with office space, hardware, software and so on. This is one of the reasons why companies often tend to hire remote employees using different hiring models.

Why Choose Distributed Teams?

Having a distributed team means your employees or team members are not located in the same office, they work remotely from different locations. While it probably sounds like lots of communication problems, this model has actually proven its efficiency. Moreover, you would save on operational costs, taxes and software development costs. Also, with the proper subcontractor, you won’t face communication or management issues.

Of course, you can always hire a freelancer but this way you can’t be sure that quality and deadlines would be met. On the contrary, choosing distributed teams for your projects means working on a contract basis and that’s why it’s much safer. All you need is to share your requirements with potential team members and your subcontractor would provide you with the best fit for the job. It might be a bit more expensive than hiring freelancers but you still save a lot because the members of a distributed team are usually located in countries with a great tech talent pool and relatively low salaries.

Disrupted Team Management

With this solution, you also don’t have to worry about team management. Your service provider has the right experience to know how to improve team efficiency and usually, everything is already set up and ready to go. This means that you won’t have to spend your in-house resources and your time to build the team and organize the workflow. It’s also the answer to how to improve time management. As a rule, disrupted teams apply Scrum, Agile project management methodologies or another if appropriate.

Another significant benefit you get with this model is easily scalable development team. This is because your subcontractor has a well-established tech talent pipeline. Yet again, the right specialist or even a whole team can be sitting around waiting for a new project because they are done with the last one. This means you can use those resources without any extra efforts like recruitment and onboarding.

What Can Go Wrong?

Sometimes even such a service provider is not able to find the right specialist for the job. For example, have you ever heard of Yocto developers? I bet you didn't because there’s only a few of them out there. As long as your requirements are not ‘special’, everything would be fine. Disrupted teams may face just the same problems as in-house ones. Things happen and particular circumstances can result in unexpected issues. Still, you have a contract and your service provider has a reputation to maintain. This means the team would do everything possible and impossible to get the job done right in time.