How to Overcome the Obstacles of Offshore Development ?

Companies turn to offshore development to bring in new developer talent. It enables businesses to benefit directly from the pull of technical talent available in many parts of the world. Obviously, the vast majority of leading technology companies rely on the offshore development model to supplement their talent pool. But that doesn't stop small businesses and startups from jumping on the offshore development bandwagon. An offshore development model is a viable option for any company looking to scale up development resources and innovation in order to gain a clear competitive advantage.

To bring on an offshore team and have it continuously add value to your software development process, you must perfect your strategy and be well aware of the common challenges faced by other companies and their respective solutions.

Understanding the Offshore Development Challenges

There are several myths surrounding offshore development. Many businesses believe that in order to begin with offshore development, the in-house development process must be revitalised. Other companies believe that you need a large development team with several project managers ready to collaborate with the offshore team. In reality, all you need to do is inform your offshore team about the best development practises. The required code quality, documentation, and collaboration practises for the projects should be clearly communicated to your offshore team well in advance.

Visit:https://bit.ly/3C006gX

Here are the key principles to keep in mind as you embark on your offshore development journey.

Best development practises for code quality, collaboration, and documentation should be established ahead of time.

Offshore development projects should be overseen by a dedicated project manager.

You must plan ahead of time for the communication tools you will use for your offshore projects. If you need to use a specific communication tool or virtual office tool, you should test it and fix the communication protocols to avoid disorder and chaos later.

It is recommended to organise joint programming sessions to ensure higher code quality and consistent coding standards across both in-house and offshore teams.

It is always best to start with a small developer team comprised of exceptional developer talents and then gradually build the team around this nucleus.

Instead of isolating your offshore team from your regular development teams, include them in the process and assign them tasks to work on with on-site developers.

Finally, you must have a long-term strategy in place to develop offshore skills and position them as valuable creative assets to the company.

Last but not least, consider how you will build your offshore development team. You can hire an offshore agency with a proven track record of managing offshore projects in your preferred country. You can also hire freelance developers and delegate projects to them. Alternatively, you can establish your own presence by establishing an offshore development facility. While the first option is more reliable and less expensive, the last option is highly effective but more expensive. Unless you hire industry-renowned developers, the middle path of working with freelance offshore developers often lacks quality assurance.

Common Obstacles and Solutions

When you are new to offshore development, you will encounter a number of pain points, inconveniences, and roadblocks in each project. But, with time, you learn how to deal with these difficulties. This is why it is important to understand the challenges that the majority of companies face when managing multiple offshore projects and to prepare the assets and processes to deal with them.

Various Working Hours
Developer teams located in different time zones frequently struggle to collaborate and communicate at the same time. Different working hours based on time zones and local time in the respective countries continue to be a major issue for offshore projects. This frequently necessitates developers working late at night or, in rare cases, an unintended delay in support or feedback.

Consider the overlapping working hours for the respective offshore locations well in advance.
Allow for a couple of overlapping hours above and beyond working hours to accommodate offshore communication.
Plan alternate times for project managers and developers who are working with the offshoring.

Language And Cultural Differences
In development projects where continuous and steady communication is a necessity, the differences corresponding to the language and culture make a big roadblock. While quality communication barring the language and cultural differences is very important for great development output, you need to have an effective plan to achieve this. Here are some effective tips.

Use a common communication language and tool that the vendor and offshore developers find easy and engaging.

Assess the communication skill of the vendor and the offshore developers and take onboard the ones who can effectively communicate.

Plan social and cultural activities to allow more sharing space and bonding of individuals.

Try to nurture teams that have similar engineering value and philosophy.

Make the offshore team feel as organic part of your development process and not a secluded one.

Here are some of the major challenges and solutions for offshore development projects.

Quality of Development

One of the most pressing concerns for companies involved in offshore development is maintaining a high standard of quality for applications and software products. Several factors contribute to the problem, including a lack of communication among developers, a lack of understanding, the absence of a common coding standard, and the failure to implement best practises. Quality issues are also common among vendors who employ inexperienced and unskilled developers. Here are a few effective solutions to this problem.

Make certain that you use the most appropriate resources to evaluate the vendor and the offshore development team. If you lack such resources, seek assistance from an offshore hiring agency with a proven evaluation process.
Make sure you have a solid quality assurance process in place to evaluate the output of both your offshore and on-site teams.

Meeting Everyone's Expectations

The overall qualitative parameters frequently differ from what is expected. When a vendor and a company share common expectations, opinions about the user interface, user experience, and security become more consistent.

Only work with offshore vendors who have demonstrated expertise in Agile development, Test-Driven Development, and Continuous Delivery.

Always insist on meeting the gross value standard and quality parameters specified at the outset before focusing solely on the intricate details.
Ensure that the developer teams collaborate closely with a shared understanding of expectations and objectives.

Conclusion

As digital communication brings people and professionals closer together, and as the workplace increasingly blurs the boundaries of location, time, and space, as collaborative work with development team members spread across multiple locations becomes a reality, the line between on-site and offshore development will continue to blur.The more we become accustomed to this new workplace, the less we will perceive such challenges to offshore development. tags: challenges, software development, offshore development, website development, mobile app development.