System development outsourcing is not a new phenomenon, but the amount of decisions CTOs need to take when it comes to hiring a team can quickly fall into a slippery slope of striking balances and managing risks that usually ends up feeling more like a leap of faith. Is outsourcing right for me? Will productivity suffer by having a distributed team? Will I need multiple vendors to cover the range of technologies I’m looking for? What about security?
Earlier this year, BairesDev partnered with a US top consulting firm that voiced these very same concerns. On this new and highly innovative project, all efforts had to focus on developing a platform capable of offering a range of services based on state-of-the-art algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
Security, Scalability & Usability
Recognizing patterns on an image, feelings on a text string or identifying languages in a written or spoken medium are just a few examples of the requirements each algorithm had to cover. Each of these models had to be packaged into a service and offered to users with varied purposes like “vehicle-tracking”, “facial recognition”, “emotion detection”, among others.
While also intended for commercial and educational use, most services were related to public safety. Because of this, the platform had to operate under strict user authentication and security policies. This meant all information had to be encrypted and secure under many access authentication layers to ensure it remained confidential. In addition, platform robustness had to be met with a scalable architecture allowing a seamless experience for millions of users.
With technical skills including UI/UX, Data Science, AI, DevOps, Frontend/Backend and QA engineers, both expertise and headcount were crucial to ensure successful end-to-end delivery. Besides development itself, user documentation had to be written in real-time, requiring a Project Manager and Scrum Master capable of designing a highly efficient pipeline spanning multiple areas and varied technical expertise.
This presented the perfect opportunity for BairesDev to propose a solution using our Delivery Team Approach. Through our extremely strict process that selects only Top 1% IT talent in the market, BairesDev’s staffing team worked to quickly select the roles and skillsets required to ensure best practices in code, software quality and enhanced user experience.
During an initial design phase with a reduced core team, the project’s tech stack, scope, and backlog were defined in preparation for development. One of the main challenges was to create an effective process that could provide enough synergy to a distributed team of 25 people while reducing development time.
In order to achieve these goals, the Project Manager, Scrum Master and Technical Lead put together a dynamic team structure where development for each requirement was carried over in parallel as much as possible across frontend, backend, QA, and technical writing. Additionally, continuous quality assurance and benchmarking across the entire software development process made it possible to achieve a performance of at least 90% for each new functionality with minimal documentation rewrites.
What sets us apart
BairesDev is able to offer outstanding solutions by putting together high-performance teams at the fastest rates of the industry with the most productive engineers across a myriad of technologies. This allows for a fast ramp-up, produces high-quality solutions and minimizes issues during the development lifecycle. We have proven through experience that hiring senior engineers is a cost-efficient way to improve performance and significantly reduce time to market in a trusting environment where clients can feel at ease working with highly-effective workflows.
