When you are developing a software product, you look for ways to save your additional costs, increase operational capacity and free your in-house team to work upon more crucial tasks. An expert professional offshore team with years of experience in software development is one thing that business needs. Hiring offshore developers can save your money and make your product market ready faster.

If you are wondering what exactly is meant by offshore software development, think a bit of outsourcing. In outsourcing, a business enterprise may delegate the entire project or just specific features or parts of the same to the outsourced company or teams.

In this article, we will have a brief discussion on what is offshore software development and its benefits. Also, we look at what are the traits to be considered when hiring offshore software developers.

What is Offshore Software Development?

Offshore software development is the delegation of all development tasks to a third-party software company or developer(s). The offshore services may include web development, mobile app development, etc. The main reasons for using such an approach is to reduce the infrastructure cost, lack of expertise skill set, and to focus on core business areas.

The terms Offshoring and Outsourcing are in a way different from each other. However, offshoring happens to be just a small part of what is called outsourcing software development services.

To implement and embrace the offshore development effectively and reduce the risks with offshore software development, you need to follow some practices:

Get introduced to all offshore developers

Introduce your offshore team to the entire in-house team. This will help the offshore developers to have smooth communication with offshore team members. This will result in a successful outcome when doing offshore development.

Read also: Tips for hiring offshore developers

Hire small but highly skilled team

Instead of hiring a large team of developers, recruit some of the highly skilled and experienced developers. As the team size is smaller, the visibility is much improved, and the healthier communication results in beneficial outcomes.

Initiate daily meetings and video conferencing

Regular communication and collaboration between the onshore and offshore teams is crucial for meeting business goals. Organizing daily status meetings, video conferencing using remote tools is more productive and with this every issue can be resolved in real-time.

Make optimum use of best software development remote tools

It is essential to plan, track, and release quality software products to meet your business requirements when doing offshore software development. Remote working tools like Slack, Basecamp, Jira enable you to efficiently plan tasks, distribute them evenly across teams, seamless communication between teams and prioritize work accordingly.

Advantages of Offshore Software Development

Hiring an offshore development team is not easy as it seems. Choosing the right offshore resource that fits your business requirements is a time taking process. Let’s dive out what all are the advantages of offshore software development:

Lower cost

Maintaining and managing an in-house team is quite challenging as well as costly. By offshoring your software development, businesses don’t have to invest in IT infrastructure or spend time recruiting, and training employees.

Access to a vast pool of talent

Offshore development helps you to get a vast pool of talented and experienced software developers. Also, the offshore development company or a developer has experience in working on international software development projects for clients. So, they can overcome the challenges involved when communicating.

Faster time-to-market

A dedicated team of qualified professionals ensures on-time delivery of software products. Not only this, the software product developed reaches the market faster. Also, an external team can offer new insights to improve your business processes, letting you leverage innovation and creativity at each stage of the software lifecycle.

More time to focus on core business activities

Offshore software development enables you to focus more on core business areas. The time can be used to leverage research and development, innovation, planning for some high-end and powerful products.

Offshore Software Development rates by Regions

5+ Must-have Skills for an offshore developer 

Offshoring makes software development solutions seem cheaper and faster. This isn’t quite the case if you haven’t hired the right offshore developer. So what are those ingredients that every offshore developer must have? A key to efficiency and meeting deadlines is a skillful offshore developer. Let's look at those 5 essential skills an offshore developer needs to have.

Supreme Communication Skills

Being a software developer, excellent communication skills are highly needed when working with clients. But if it is an offshore developer, these skills are must to have. A successful offshore developer must have a clear understanding of American business culture, and always be upfront with project requirement commitments.

The communication skills help the developer to maintain seamless communication with its team members. Also cultural understanding helps them to understand each other better and build a strong team culture.

 An offshore software developer must have a diverse skill-set and zeal to learn and adopt the trending technologies constantly. They must have a broader perspective to understand the cutting-edge technologies and build the next generation application.

Refactoring

An offshore developer needs to be proficient in implementing refactoring. A good developer should never be dependent on an old code. Old codes can be reused smartly but only via proper refactoring. Refactoring allows offshore software developers to have complete control of the code. The emerging technologies, frameworks, and libraries might test the technical capabilities of the developer but then refactoring an old code allows independence over the code’s influence.

A question of whether testing should be included in the developer skill-set checklist is always asked. Offshore software developers used to think that testing was not their counterpart. Testing will have its usual functions of fixing bugs and writing efficient codes which should be done by a separate team of testers.

Only if offshore developers are equipped with testing, can they streamline their working methodology into a smooth process. The developers need to find an intersecting line between testing teams and them.

Willingness to learn New Technologies

The emerging new technologies help developers to write efficient codes, build powerful systems, provide seamless customer experience and a lot more. The willingness to learn Swift, python, Scala, or other new coding languages is important. Apart from that, you can also see how eager they are to learn about the new libraries and methods. All of this contributes to a great software developer.

Ability to leverage Existing Codes

Leveraging existing codes can save time and cost which can be used to build new robust codes and huge libraries. The offshore developer needs to be free from fixing old codes and rather find a way to utilize those codes to generate new ones through internal infrastructures and third party libraries to leverage web-scale services.

Teamwork

Teamwork ability should be inbuilt in the offshore software developer. A successful offshore software developer should always be a good communicator and a team player who is able to develop comprehensible reports and instructions and to convey ideas to the team and clients seamlessly.

Time and Task Management

Software developers having expertise and years of experience are highly reliable. They have a strong work ethic and time management trait. The ability to measure the amount of time needed to complete a task, communicating, and delivering it to the end-customer should be there in an offshore developer.

Follows Collaborative Approach

An effective offshore developer must be agile enough to work as a remote member of the project team. He must be equipped with the right project management and team collaboration tools so that there is no lag in their work schedule or task delivery.

Detail Oriented

The missing dots are connected by the details. This is one of the most important personal traits which need to be sought for when hiring offshore developers. Apart from the developer’s vision and his discipline, a detail oriented approach is what needs to be put into place as a part of the training program itself. Let me outline a simple example to illustrate where the details exist:

Installation > Deployment > Communication > Testing > Execution

There are more stages involved after execution too but then the details exist everywhere in the process right from the simple installation to deployment to execution. A faulty installation or just one wrong column or inefficient deployment can completely create a crisis situation. To avoid this it needs to be ensured that the offshore developer maintains his detail oriented approach in all parts of his execution.

Onboarding these skills, an offshore developer can yield the results expected from offshoring. Then will an enterprise be able to boast of what the venture capitalists are always looking for – More output/Less money, More ROI/Lower budget.

Read also: How To Manage The Huffs & Puffs Of An Offshore Agile Team

Offshore developers bring in a number of advantages to any IT team. If your business is not interested in hiring offshore, take a look at these benefits.

• Increase in operational capacity
• Reduction in labor costs as one is saved from paying wage taxes of employees.
• Saving of time and money in finding the right candidate for the specific job
• Gain significant competitive edge.
• It’s innovative.

Read also: Guide To Successful Offshore Web Development Using Distributed Agile Methodology

Wrapping Up

As the offshore software development trend continues to rise, the need for expert and professional offshore developers has also increased.

So, when you are going to offshore software developers for your upcoming project, it is not that you always look for the amount of theoretical knowledge they have. Rather, there are many more traits to consider when hiring software developers.

If you want to add an offshore remote resource, make sure you analyze them using the above traits in order to add value to your product. You may need to evaluate some of their previous works before making final decision.