Offshore software development comes with many pros, and with every added benefit, there are challenges you must accept. Benefits and challenges are the two faces of every coin, and it’s no different for offshore software development either.
While it provides reduced costs, access to global talent, and an opportunity to get the product developed without taking any responsibility, it also adds some challenges. The challenges with offshore software development are minor and can be dealt with pretty efficiently. So, if you are a company looking to hire an offshore software development company, don’t step back from the challenges, just look at the benefits of this model, and you’ll thank yourself for leveraging this.
Let’s discuss the top 5 challenges almost all companies face while looking for offshore software development and how to deal with them effectively.
Top 5 Offshore Software Development Challenges Challenges with their Solutions
1. Communication and Collaboration
Offshore development means hiring resources and companies from other countries and leveraging them to build your projects. This will naturally cause a time zone difference, and when you hire from certain parts of the globe, time zone issues can be significant. Apart from the time zone, most countries have different cultures, which adds cultural bias to people and makes them think of things differently.
The time zone challenge adds barriers to effective communication and collaboration, which makes the project suffer. Many times certain ideas can be expressed best with the help of in-person meetings or regular connections, and nothing can replace this. In many parts of the world, there are connectivity issues, and networks are not stable enough to host long video calls, or the speed is too slow for effective communication. These challenges are faced by almost all companies when they start working with an offshore software development company.
But we are different, we have the best tools for communication and collaboration that help us stay aligned with client expectations and deliver a good product. All the projects we do are built in our development centers around the world, and these centers are equipped with superfast internet and audio-video conferencing tools that enable seamless communication.
Our team members have access to mails 24*7, and thus they are available at all times for a quick call or any query resolution. Moreover, all our team members know global cultures and try their best to relate to the customer’s cultures to understand their problems from a completely different angle.
2. Managing and Tracking Project
Most companies think that offshore software development is only good if you keep an eye on the company all the time. Though managing and tracking projects is a challenge most projects come across, it is not as enormous that you have to start thinking in a completely different direction from offshore software development.
If you’ve selected a suitable project management methodology and a good project manager, everything after this is easy. Today there are multiple project management and planning tools that can simplify your task of managing projects of all sizes. If you are not using them, it is going to cost you a lot of stress and delay in deliveries, and that’s a big challenge.
You can use a project management and planning tool like Jira, Asana, Trello, and more to plan out the project effectively and complete everything in time. Moreover, you can break down the project into multiple segments/tasks and can assign them to individual team members to work upon. Then they can update the status every time there is progress or roadblock, and you can have a concise view of the project at any time.
3. Ineffective Cost Saving and Code Quality
Ineffective cost savings is another challenge that many businesses face. In this, the companies try to save lots of money while hiring the offshore development company, and then it results in overspending because the company is not efficient.
If you want to build enterprise-scale products, you should not focus solely on saving costs because, most times, cheap service is not the best. While you may say that you are going for offshore software development just because the prices are pretty low, do consider that it can backfire anytime and leave you in miserable conditions, there are various guides for offshore software development available in the market that help you to choose the ideal outsourcing company.
Trying to save costs on the hardware you run your projects will make it prone to failures and frequent issues that might render the product unusable in just some time. Companies that offer services at the lowest rates often employ less skilled developers, and this reflects directly in the quality of code they write.
To solve this challenge effectively, you’ll have to consider many parameters apart from prices to hire the best offshore software development company. Moreover, it will be mindful you to set coding standards for the project and make everyone comply with them strictly. Doing this will help you make a streamlined code base that will be easy to work with in the future if there are any changes.
4. Technology and Talent
Not every technology is suitable for your project. You might consider that technology is good for your project, but if you are a non-technical person, following your gut feeling here can be a costly choice.
On the other hand, you might have decided to use technology, and the talent for that might be significantly low in the market, which can be a massive challenge in itself. You cannot create masters in any technology instantly. Thus it’s better to look at the trending technologies and see what suits you better.
Hardware is another area of challenge, and the prices for hardware systems are different throughout the world. If you buy servers in some areas, they can be a costly choice when you compare them with any other, and there is a chance of unavailability too.
Whether it is talent, hardware, or technology, everything is spread unevenly around the world, and as a business owner, you have to explore the perfect balance between the three.
Such challenges can be overcome effectively by partnering with a leading offshore software development company. These companies have expert business analysts and project managers who drill down and understand your requirements well and advise you on all fronts. Moreover, leading companies often host tech experts for all the technologies, and this can prove a game-changer if you ever feel like changing the technology.
5. Competition and Proof of Concept
The offshore software development industry is brimmed with competition, and it will only increase as the demand for such services increases. There are no signs of slowing down, and thus finding the best company for your projects is quite challenging.
Due to the competition and the many choices you have, you’ll have to adopt a method that uncovers the true potential of each company and its services, and you can do this by research.
While selecting a company, interview their team members and ask them to show their portfolios, and try to assess them based on their logical thinking and analytical abilities. You can also request a company to come up with a proof of concept to gain an idea of their implementation skills and how well they’ve understood your requirements.
Conclusion
Working with offshore software development companies can be challenging, but the benefits they provide will surely cover up the challenges you face. You should not get demotivated by the challenges as there are ways to overcome challenges, and we’ve also listed the solutions to the challenges above. Many other challenges can be solved by working with the right software outsourcing service provider like us, so why wait, connect with us today, and let’s build your project in a better way.
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