The benefits of hiring an Offshore Software Development Company

Both software startups and scaling companies can benefit from hiring an offshore software development company. One can benefit by gaining quick traction, while the other can get expertise and extra capacity at an affordable price. Not only that, hiring software developers will help you free up your time so that you can spend more time building the business around your product instead of building the product itself.

There’s always the option to build your own in-house team, but that will cost you a lot and might not always be feasible. Hiring and managing individual remote developers is also possible, but that can get complicated quickly. On the other hand, with an offshore development company, you get a fully-fledged team as a service that can handle everything for you. 

What is Offshore Software Development?

Offshore software development is a type of outsourcing. It involves hiring developers in another part of the world to help code a software product. That could be anything from the front end of an app to the back end of a website. 

Regardless of whether your offshore developers are responsible for all or part of the development process, the objective remains the same: build the best software product in the shortest possible time frame. 

Under Agile principles, this objective gains an even leaner edge ensuring offshore software developers deliver on (or even before) time – enhancing the benefits of adopting offshore software development. 

The Benefits of Offshore Software Development

Now let’s take a closer look at the main benefits of hiring an offshore software development company, starting with the cost-benefit.  

1. Cost-effectiveness 

Hiring a team of software engineers – even if that team is just two people – is an expensive outlay. When you factor in local labor costs, the time and money needed to recruit, onboard and train the right employees, plus the additional ongoing costs of keeping them as company employees with sick pay, annual leave, pension contributions, and more – it soon adds up. 

The benefit of hiring an offshore software development company is that you have a single cost agreed upon upfront. And when your project finishes, there’s no further cost unless you wish to retain their services.  

2. Experience on-demand 

You can obtain the exact skills and expertise you require using an offshore development company. In today’s world, technology is always advancing. For that reason, there is an ongoing shortage of IT specialists in certain fields, including the latest programming languages. 

Hiring offshore opens up the global talent pool. When hiring in your own country becomes difficult, you can look abroad to find experienced and well-educated software engineers. Choosing the right offshore software development company means they already have the experience and understanding of your challenges. 

3. Ease of recruitment 

When it comes to offshore software development, you don’t have to worry about the recruitment process. Your offshore software development company handles all aspects of recruitment for you like

  • selecting candidates with the right profile to suit your needs
  • dealing with all the formalities

Because of this, you can completely focus on your core business and ways to grow it. Also, you don’t have to worry about maintaining an in-house team at the project’s end.

Not only this, there will be times in your business when you might have to let go of some of your employees to scale down a bit. This is definitely a challenging task and comes with additional costs.

Also, there is a chance that your team member might leave you. Again, you need to start your costly recruitment process.

4. Sustainable scaling

Like any business in software development, there are peaks and troughs.

  • During peaks, you might need additional capacity to keep up with growth.
  • In troughs, you might need to reduce your team to cut costs.   

When you might need to add new features quickly or move towards a new vertical, you need a new team as quickly as possible. 

The beauty of hiring an offshore development team through a dedicated company, as opposed to individual developers, is that they can scale with you, providing the right skills and the extra capacity you need when you need it the most. 

And should the time come when you need to scale down because that piece of development is now complete, you’re not left with the difficult decision of letting employees go.

5. Faster time-to-market

Speed and accuracy are essential when you’re trying to stay ahead in a competitive market. Making the most of world time zones and the global talent pool, you could have developers working around the clock, helping you to take your product to market much sooner.

Adding capacity with a self-managed team of developers working with an Agile mindset means you don’t need to worry about day-to-day project management. Someone else handles that for you. 

In addition, because developers working in Agile take an iterative approach to product development, it means you can focus on bringing core functionality to market sooner and then build it out over time.

Offshore Software Development challenges

Whilst there are obvious benefits to offshore development, there are some common challenges associated with it:

1. Time zone differences

While your chosen offshore software development company might be self-managing and autonomous, there will still be times when you and your team will need to communicate with them.

You can always schedule daily or weekly meetings. But, there might be a problem when you need to get hold of the team in case of emergencies like your application stops working or gets hacked.

This is especially true when they’re handling one piece in a more extensive software build, and you might have different development teams working on different areas. 

To overcome this challenge, always look for an offshore team who can provide continuous support per your time zone.

2. Communication Barriers

In software development, English has become the language of choice. But just because people speak the same language doesn’t mean they will always fully understand each other. 

In a field like software development, with its unique and complex terminology, miscommunication can occur – especially when multiple communication channels are in use simultaneously, from email to video calls. 

Communication issues can cause bumps in the road that slow down development. That’s why finding an offshore development company with English-speaking developers is important.

3. Cultural differences

As with any external organization, ensuring a cultural fit with your offshore software development company is important. Different cultural values can result in different communication styles and ways of working and mismatches around expectations.

Misaligned cultural values can result in strained working relationships, which will become detrimental to both productivity and the quality of the code. You will also need to factor in things like festive holidays, which will impact development.

4. Quality control

One of the biggest fears around hiring offshore developers is poor code quality. Your code is your most valuable asset. The developers you hire could be inexperienced or recent graduates without the relevant skills or training. 

Working with developers you don’t know, located in another part of the world, could result in poor code quality. This could lose you valuable time and also require a costly fix.  As the offshore team handles everything, you might have no idea about how your product is built. They might be using outdated or vulnerable code. Using a reputable offshore software development company with proven examples of their work can eliminate these fears.

Looking for something else? Read our resources on offshore software development:

The Benefits of hiring Proshore’s offshore teams

Ten years ago, software companies were cautious about using offshore developers and needed convincing as to the benefits of hiring an offshore development company. 

Today, it’s the industry norm. What’s changed is that forward-thinking offshore development companies have addressed the potential challenges and turned them to their advantage. 

At Proshore we’ve got a proven track record of helping to build high-quality software – including apps and SaaS – by offering our experienced development teams as a service. 

The advantages of hiring Proshore as your offshore software development company include:

1️⃣ Ready-to-code English-speaking remote development teams based in Nepal.

Everyone on the team has a good grasp of English, so communication won’t be an issue. The only issues will be focusing on will be related to your software development needs.

2️⃣ Everything you’d expect from an in-house team (minus the office space).

Since we operate from two different locations (Nepal & the Netherlands), clients from different time zones get continuous support – meetings are conducted as per the overlap with your time zone plus software development takes place even outside your working hours.

3️⃣ Hand-picked, coached, and self-managed tech talent bespoke to your needs.

All talents working as part of your extended offshore team are mutually selected along with you and can be changed or scaled up/down a need. Furthermore, they operate on new and future-proof technologies, thus ensuring high-quality results.

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