The last year brought emerging challenges for businesses already building or planning to create new software products. Multiple changes relate to the areas of application performance, customer digital experience, safety and data analytics. The pandemic enabled a giant leap for people’s online presence than any digital transformation program. Managing an omnichannel to meet the new requirements imposes on app providers the need to re-energize around their customers’ experience. Growing a business now requires implementing a new vision and strategy for building software.
Focusing on the software development process and future product quality is one of the most important factors that lead you to a solid ROI. Building quality software improves your customer loyalty, builds brand trust and helps to scale your business. Nearshore software team outsourcing can help you to achieve those objectives. A successfully launched partnership helps you to confidently deliver the project on time, within budget, and build a high-quality product. I’d like to share with you how a nearshore team can address software quality issues.
Quality mechanisms in place
The reputation of an outsourced nearshore team relies on its performance and the quality of its work. The team frequently makes sure that the delivery results meet your requirements. A reliable nearshore team follows a mature delivery process and has a set of internal mechanisms to ensure quality. How does it work in practice? You can expect the team to use coding standards and best practices, use effective quality assurance techniques, and maintain documentation. A team working in the Scrum framework, which is used in the majority of our nearshore projects, will communicate on a regular basis with daily meetings, undertake code reviews and sprint retrospectives. To keep the stakeholders up to speed with the progress of development, the team will demonstrate a working version of the product in short production cycles.
Regular assessment and feedback loops
On top of that, the nearshore company has a multistage verification process for new candidates and performs periodical assessments of developers’ competences over the course of collaboration. To ensure continuing good quality, you will also be asked to share your impressions of cooperation with the team.
Agile for smooth progress
Nearshore software partners are Agile (Scrum, Kanban) and Lean methodologies practitioners. Agile facilitates the provision of a good quality product by constantly tracking the progress of work. Launching cooperation with a nearshore team that follows Agile methodologies will help you to better align the project progression with your business goals. Agile flow embraces the continuous improvement process, which has a positive impact on the quality of software as well. Your nearshore partner’s Agile approach will help you to run your software development at a higher level.
Enhancing productivity and timely delivery
A nearshore team will not only help you to build quality software, but will also offer support in terms of enhancing productivity and the timely delivery of your product. How? Because a reliable partner has to operate with full transparency and with an outcome-driven approach for work to be done. You monitor the progress of work and attend sprint demos to stay up-to-date with the status of development. Tools like Jira, YouTrack or Azure DevOps facilitate your project tracking, and you’re provided with reports on project performance and status, a cost overview, and the total working hours of the team.
Multidisciplinary cooperation for better productivity
When working with a nearshore software partner, you can benefit from their multidisciplinary competences. Having worked on different projects throughout their career, your partner can unite experts from a variety of departments and fields. Having access to a wide range of experts will help you to tackle challenges relating to architecture planning, choosing the technology stack, preparing testing strategy or setting up security infrastructure. In case of knowledge deficiencies, you gain access to cross-technology competences, without having to invest additional money in the search for and signing contracts with external experts. A multidisciplinary approach creates collaborative sharing, boosting product improvements and the introduction of new ideas, all of which influence the quality of your final software.
A clip: quality control and testing
Test planning should begin before the design phase. Once you have the requirements in place, you can do effective test planning, setting up the testing requirements, roadmap, scope, and assess the necessary skillset for product development. Nowadays, many software teams are pushed to deploy new code even on an hourly basis without performing any testing. It happens due to time pressure, a lack of resources or a lack of the right automation for the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) process. QA strategy for the product can require different testing skills at different stages of the project. If necessary, your nearshore partner will be ready to offer you all the required testing competences, a Test Manager, a QA Leader, an Automation Test Engineer, a Manual Tester, or a QA Analyst.
Code review and tech debt verification
A nearshore team using a code review is one of the best practices that have a direct impact on quality. The code review can be done during the handover process at the beginning of cooperation, when the new team assesses the condition of the software and the capabilities of handling it. The code review, in that case, helps to learn the programming style the project needs and analyze any potential technical debt. The second case in which a nearshore team uses a code review is as part of the programming routine, when introducing new features or changes to the code. A code review will also be helpful when introducing new developers to the team. Seasoned developers then mentor the new members, letting them know about the knowledge hidden within the code. Code reviews used by nearshore teams in the abovementioned ways improve quality, promote high standards of development work and enhance the communication culture within your project.
Working with the world’s best engineers
Offshore teams that are willing to accept a low market price are likely to produce work of lower technical quality and have a limited understanding of the EU business environment and client expectations. On the contrary, partnering with a nearshore company is a much better alternative. Whether you are a start-up or grounded enterprise planning to establish an external team, destinations like Poland will be the best fit.
According to rankings, Poland is one of the best locations to outsource, offering an extensive pool of IT specialists with cultural and work ethics similar to those found in Western Europe. With moderate rates, you can afford very high levels of expertise. According to HackerRank, Polish devs are among the top three best engineers in the world. In other categories, Poland is ranked 1st in Java programming and 2nd in the algorithms domain. In the Top Coder ranking, Poland is up there in the
world’s top five.
A nearshore team, while adjusting to your way of software delivery, at the same time applies and shares best practices for software development and testing. This broadens your perspective on technical challenges and may give a boost when it comes to new ideas to consider and implement. An established nearshore partnership can transform your product development and software quality for the better, and can even be the key to the success of your projects. If you decide to work with a Polish software team, you can be sure that you’ll receive a high-quality product.
