How to achieve Silicon Valley quality code with offshore teams
Dumani’s simple three-step approach to achieve Silicon Valley quality apps with offshore teams.
Depending on the project, it can cost a company anywhere between tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros to develop software, excluding the significant recruitment, hiring and equipment costs to hire the right employees. Add to the mix three to six months to onboard and ramp up productivity for new hires, and this can set teams on a long journey before launching your app into production, to say nothing of the added burn rate and risk of carrying additional employees on your ongoing payroll after the app is launched.
This is where Dumani comes into play. For the past seven years we have been collaborating with companies across industries, providing individual developers and full teams that integrate within our clients’ internal development teams and in many cases fully staff the entire software engineering department. Dumani’s world-class developers can temporarily augment a development team that is short-handed or work side-by-side on an ongoing open-ended basis, providing long-term consistency with the fiscal flexibility of a contract team of excellent developers that are not formally employees. Our mission is to re-invent the way software is created, while at the same time, offering Silicon Valley quality.
1. It all starts with great communication.
As important as exemplary coding skills are to producing great software, research shows that communication is the key element to achieving great engineering. Effective communication enables good collaboration, reduces time and costs, and increases productivity.
“This is a team that genuinely wants to achieve something great together, in contrast to people who just follow directions. They’re deeply engaged. They take responsibility. Communication with the team is excellent. First, they want to understand the issues — it’s amazing how determined they are to understand the product and the market. Secondly, they’re proactive. When problems arise, they always propose a range of solutions — often options for the product we haven’t even thought about yet. And they don’t hesitate to point out possible problems we haven’t considered. It’s a real pleasure to work together and I look forward to working with them again.”
Giuseppe Frigiola, Sharpy Survey
2. Next, have the right process in place.
Clear objectives, goals and requirements are the prerequisites for a successful software development process. Client stakeholders (founders/CEOs, product managers, etc.) can have great ideas, but it is important to sit down, go through user needs, identify constraints, and prioritize make-or-break features. Dumani sets itself apart from most offshore teams in our ability to be proactive, understand problems first, and propose options, rather than just following rote work orders. This ability to understand and internalize client business goals and provide true consulting value is far more important to the success of any app than blindly delivering “lines of code.” And it is extraordinarily rare in outsourced teams.
“I love working with this team. These developers are great people and great communicators, who are honest, open, organized, proactive, totally dedicated to the project, and professional. They are not the thorny arrogant types you see sometimes. [...] they’re completely committed to finding the best possible solution for the project. I’ve already brought them into two different companies to help out and I’ll do it again, if the need arises.”
Nic Barthelemy, Entrepreneur and Software Development Exec
3. At the end of the day, it comes down to engineering skills.
Dumani’s developers receive more ongoing training and coaching from senior Silicon Valley experts than virtually any other development team (offshore OR internal) as part of our collaboration with Silicon Villas. This provides them a steady diet of the latest web and mobile technologies, DevOps and best practices, directly from the software leaders who are at the center of the software industry. Also, engineering is not just about today – it’s also about looking over the next horizon and being prepared for scaling, both in terms of traffic as well as new features. In today’s competitive space, companies are under extreme pressure to scale and innovate at the right moment or risk sudden failure, as competitors surge ahead.
“We needed skilled people because the level of complexity in our code is very high and the ramp-up is steep. They were assigned responsibilities that were cornerstones of the platform and the overall system. Their abilities are definitely comparable to Silicon Valley and much better than other offshore developers — there’s no question on that. I cannot find a gap in their skill level; they are capable of finding extraordinary solutions to tough problems.
Together we have achieved success, with a product now used by hundreds of thousands of people and generating revenue. They are an extremely important part of our team — I would say a cardinal part of the team.”
Cristiano Ghersi, CTO, Liquid Text
Each company has its challenges and risks as you grow. We have proven that partnering with an experienced, solid outside team like Dumani can produce great apps and be an important tool in building your future success.