Software development doesn’t stop until the product is a part of the end user’s life. The apps and platforms you’re developing to enhance your business aren’t cars that leave the factory floor as completed products and then go sit in a distant dealership waiting to be test driven.
The delivery of your application should be built into the development process. After all, that date you place at the end of your software development life cycle is the time when your app goes live, not when it joins an IT queue for future launch.
Successful software delivery depends on an integrated development approach that incorporates business goals, platform execution, and core testing into each phase of the build. This approach eliminates wasted time at the end of the cycle spent calibrating the product for your users.
This approach takes planning and expertise, which is influencing many developers to seek external support in aligning their development and delivery goals.
Why Start with Software Delivery Outsourcing?
The digital marketplace evolves rapidly. User standards, platform popularity, and application interoperability change at a rate that is driving the release of millions of new products annually. In fact, there are more than 6,000 new apps released for Android alone every day.
That pace makes it nearly impossible for a single company to account for all the latest trends, threats, and points of access that influence consumers. As a result, software development outsourcing has become increasingly popular. The global market for outsourced services has almost doubled in the space of the past decade, rising from $45.6 billion in 2000 to $85.6 billion in 2018.
Even major tech powers, such as Google and Microsoft, regularly employ outsourced partners to meet the continual need for rapid deployment of quality updates, fixes, and new products.
The reasons they turn to outsourced software developers and IT services are many, including:
- Rapid production increases at peak times
- Onboarding domain expertise
- Augmenting staff requirements for project management and maintenance
- Cost-effective expertise
- Incorporation of the latest tools, technologies, and trends
The secret to maximizing the impact of outsourced services is the same as the secret to successful software delivery outlined above – integration.
5 Software Delivery Best Practices for Your Project
Outsourcing means working in partnership. The expert minds and engineering power you bring in to deliver your project collaborate with your staff, work toward your product’s business goals, and share responsibility for the quality of the end-user experience. Whether they’re engaged to provide an end-to-end software development solution or to boost your engineering power at specific peak periods, you should feel in total control while also being fully supported.
This close collaboration unlocks resource and time savings that lead to faster development of better products. By always keeping the overall end-user experience in mind you can work together to produce something that flows seamlessly from concept to customer.
Your expert partner can also guide you through the software delivery best practices that are the foundation of such a smooth transition.
1. Focus on Your Business Goals
Your product must effectively solve a user need in the most engaging way possible. That’s ultimately how it will be judged in the marketplace. Delivering that product in a timely manner depends on incorporating that solution into everything you do along the production path.
You should begin your outsourced partnership with a clear discussion of your business goals, and a shared understanding of how to meet them.
Your business goals are like a compass for you and your outsourced partner, guiding you through your decision-making and helping you to cut away excess features and design complexity leaving you with an intuitive, enjoyable, and effective solution.
2. Adopt an Agile Approach
This process of continual referral to your core goals is best achieved using an Agile approach to software development. This method is designed to incorporate constant product evolution, with testing and input from all your internal stakeholders built into the production cycle. Rather than leave the marketing, business, and creative sides of the team out of the loop until your core code is complete, their ideas are used to shape that development.
The end result is a product that is consumer ready to go live from the moment the final unit test is complete.
3. Introduce Testing Early
Every test you complete during the production cycle is one less delay you’ll encounter at the engineering phase’s end. One of the major setbacks that can strike an outsourced partnership is the discovery of hidden and unexpected fixes late in the production cycle because your outsourced expert wasn’t involved sooner.
It is far cheaper and more time effective to perform QA and make small fixes as you go than to leave your code and user testing to the end when major repairs can become necessary.
Just as your outsourced partner must be incorporated into your day-to-day team activities, so too must your product testing. The Agile approach of continual, circular iterations of build-test-refine gets you customer-ready rapidly.
4. Know Your Platforms
The digital marketplace has brought companies and customers closer than ever by providing direct means for communication. However, the number of different ways customers can make these connections grows ever larger by the year.
To effectively deliver your product on time and in an accessible condition you have to know what platforms your customer use. There can be many.
Your outsourced partner should be a domain expert in how your industry reaches and services its customers, so encourage them to build platform, OS, device, and search engine compatibility and interactivity into each step of the design phase.
5. Target Your Releases
Finally, you must know what your customers need and expect in order to deliver your solution on time. Each product release, update, or fix must serve a clear purpose -or your customers are going to get tired of you.
Like we said above, there are literally thousands of apps competing for your customer’s attention every day. Bundle your fixes and updates for more impactful releases, deliver new features at regular, expected intervals, and provide specific explanations for how your release relates to and will improve your customer’s life.
Achieve Software Delivery Success with a Nearshore Outsourcing Partner
Each of the software delivery best practices outlined above depend on clear and regular communication. That’s why it can be an advantage to seek a nearshore development partner. Partners that share time zones and business standards with US-based companies while also offering comparable resource savings to more distant alternatives are often better equipped to deal with the back and forth of healthy communication.
Close collaboration within an Agile, integrated software development methodology places the critical product delivery phase of your project into the heart of your day-to-day workflow. By keeping your end-user in mind all along you eliminate the need for a pause between creating your product and serving your customers.
The quicker you can get your product to your customers, the quicker you can start to impress them.
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out some more outsourcing articles.
- Ensuring Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in Software Outsourcing
- Leveraging Big Data To Boost Your Outsourcing Model
- Ensuring Long-term Success with Post-Project Support in Software Outsourcing
- Crafting Comprehensive Service Level Agreements for Software Outsourcing
BairesDev can supply an entire team of engineers to your project drawn from the Top 1% IT Talent in their fields. These engineers can give you peace-of-mind that your project will reach your customers quickly and in a state that makes the most of your ideas. Contact our team today and start increasing your output.
