Offshore development mainly helps to outsource software development projects. This means you can hire a team of professionals from countries with low labor costs. In recent years, a study found that 70% of companies plan to outsource mobile app development. The offshore development team covers the entire development process from planning, coding, error testing, and maintenance. Also, with this, businesses can access a vast talent pool in cost-effective ways.
Why Choose Offshore Mobile App Development?
Most companies choose offshore mobile app development for its cost-saving options with wide talent access. Also, the scalability and flexibility are undeniable.
Cost Savings
Businesses can save 75% to 90% of labor and operating costs by adopting offshore teams. Compared to traditional onshore staffing, offshore can potentially cut down your cost to so many levels. Some of the cost-effective benefits that you might experience are –
| Onshore Development Costs | Offshore Development Costs |
|---|---|
| High labor cost | Low labor cost |
| High operational expense | Less operational expense |
| Increased onboarding cost | No onboarding cost |
| Greater Overhead cost | No Overhead cost |
- Low labor cost: When you hire from your region, most of the time, you need to spend a lot to get the top talents. On the other hand, outsourcing your project with global expertise, especially from a developing country, is the complete opposite. Here, you can make the same app with more features at a low labor cost, boosting your profit margin.
- Operating expense: The entire project is run remotely, so you seldom need resources or technical instruments. Your offshore team takes the charge of these operations.
- Onboarding cost: Recruiting staff regularly to meet your project’s needs is also expensive. Luckily, by outsourcing talents, you don’t need to onboard and train them, which minimizes this issue significantly.
- Overhead costs: The extra cost for space and resources for in-house members are higher in onshore development. In offshore hiring, you hardly need to spend any money on this. Instead, you can focus on more important terms.
Beyond these, you can have flexible cost structures when you hire offshore app development services. With low taxation and legal compliance, you don’t need to worry about spending extra money.
Access to Global Talents
Using global talents is the second popular reason for choosing offshore mobile app development. It helps you to connect with experienced developers around the globe. By searching overseas, you can find experts with the specific knowledge that suits your project.
You can easily pair up with high-quality offshore development teams by going through their services, experience, and reviews. Without the hassle of repeatedly recruiting staff, you can get productive results at affordable prices.
Scalability and Flexibility
Predicting the number of employees or developers is tricky. It’s difficult to find out how your app or project would scale in the future. However, when you use an offshore development team, you don’t need to worry about overstaffing or understaffing.
Here, you can flexibly adjust your workforce as the project scales. You don’t need any onboarding or offboarding. Based on staffing fluctuations and changing project needs, you can easily scale your team by hiring offshore developers.
Thus managing the entire process becomes more flexible. You can optimize development costs and choose new resource allocation methods.
24/7 Development Cycle
When you hire onshore experts, your project can have everything except the continuous development cycle. With an offshore team, you can run your project anytime, anywhere. This is your advantage when your team operates from different time zones.
Plus, when you opt for offshore development teams, they can support your project 24/7. Compared to traditional practice, you need to hire someone for maintenance only. The offshore mobile app development teams will maintain your project and solve technical issues whenever required.
How Offshore Mobile App Development Works
Offshore mobile development is not rocket science. This might look complex at first. You just have to know the selection processes, methods, and the entire development process to get started.
Selecting an Offshore Development Partner
To get the most cost-effective solutions with A-grade quality you need to properly evaluate offshore staff augmentation Companies. There are some of the basic criteria that you should look for while selecting your offshore partner-
- Choose countries and locations where you get low labor with high quality like South Asia.
- Companies having years of experience and a large talent pool with diverse tech stack expertise.
- Client reviews and success stories along with in-depth case studies.
- Affordable pricing models and a range of packages for small to large businesses.
- Flexible management protocols.
- High-security practices and maintenance.
- Supports you and your goal 24/7.
Now there are some questions you should ask while selecting your potential partner:
- Technologies and methods they used for app development.
- Size and structure of the development team.
- The expertise of the team that they offered you.
- Communication systems to overcome timezone barriers
- Frequency of project updates
- Quality assurance and testing methods that they use
- Description of the security protocols they maintain for sensitive data
- Scope of the adjustment of workforce for flexibility.
Project Management Models
About project management, you can either follow either agile or waterfall methods. Let’s compare them side by side to choose which matches you.
| Aspects | Agile Methodology | Waterfall Methodology |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Agile methodology is the way to break the project into several parts or phases for continuous development | Waterfall is a long-term commitment where tasks are managed in linear development one after another like a waterfall |
| Planning | Continuous development | Linear development |
| Timeframe | Short projects | Large projects |
| Stakeholders | Involved | Not involved |
| Speed | Shorter | Longer |
| Documentation | Heavily dependent on documents | Minimum documenting |
| Communication | Strong collaboration and communications | Formal communication protocols |
It doesn’t really matter which one of the management plans you choose. The main thing is to ensure the result is productive and essential. Along with this also maintain communication practices. Use collaboration tools to strengthen remote teamwork and deliver desired project results.
Development Process
Lots of companies hand over the entire mobile app development to offshore companies regardless of the phases. Decide whether you want to handle specific phases of the development process with your offshore partner or outsource the entire process.
Here’s the breakdown of the development process where offshore partners can help –
- Design: This phase is mainly when your application is only an idea. You can design your mobile application yourself or outsource it. You need to clarify your needs and project goals. They will create the prototype for you with other UX designs crafting dynamic UI.
- Coding: Usually, this part is handled top to bottom by the offshore app development teams. They manage and complete the frontend and backend development from seamless interface to server-side logic.
- Testing: Most companies hire offshore experts to test their applications. Individually testing each function in different parts, devices, and environments, they catch the bugs and resolve them sooner.
- Deployment: Lastly, the offshore team ensures the app’s entire environment. They develop CI/CD plans and work with intricate database works to immediately find errors. Even after deployment, the professionals give post-deployment support and maintenance.
Common Practices and Standards Of Development Process
Following the development process, as a client, you need to follow some standards & practices.
- Remain transparent as the project manager monitors the entire project’s growth
- Follow agile methodology and set achievable project goals
- Establish communication channels and frequencies to keep them updated.
- Plan manual and automated testing processes
- Maintaining top-notch data security measures
- Use collaboration and management tools for remote offshore teams.
Key Considerations and Challenges
We covered the common challenges with tips for solutions to help you overcome them.
Communication Barriers
Communication issues often happen due to the time zone difference and cultural barriers.
Surely, it is a big problem. When you hire your team from a completely different side of the globe, your working hours do not match. To avoid this, you can shift the meeting hours and rotate them. Adjust your working schedules and give them the flexibility to increase the overlapping hours to boost productivity.
Also, there is always misunderstandings and a lack of collaboration as the communication styles and work cultures differ. Thus, try to adapt their style and set communication guidelines. Create an inclusive environment and encourage your offshore team with incentive plans.
Quality Assurance
In the software industry alone, the US lost 2.41 trillion dollars in 2022 due to poor software quality only. Thus, you need to ensure its standard before launching the project. Set quality standard requirements at the start of the project. This will help you to decide if you’re lacking any major steps.
Besides regular testing protocols, don’t forget to review the entire process regularly. Go through the codes and monitor the team’s tasks to avoid future issues. Address all issues and provide regular feedback to the team. With this, offshore companies will have transparent ideas about your plan as you hugely decrease quality risks.
Intellectual Property and Security
It’s quite normal as businesses often feel unsafe to share personal information with a third party. It is not a major problem and can be easily solved. First of all, you need to protect your IP rights. To do this you can create patents, trademarks, and even NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). Also, you can register with the government for security issues.
Next, you need to ensure proper data security protocols with the offshore development teams. Use encryption methods in data storage. Also, review how the agencies follow the security steps. If required, ask them to set up access controls and authentication measures that are compliant with the laws.
Legal and Contractual Issues
Outsourcing experts without land boundaries poses the risk of legal compliance. As you might not know all the laws and rules of another region, you might struggle with this while working.
For this, you need to get a clear understanding of the legal frameworks. Data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA also need to be taken into account. Consult a legal advisor if required to help to overcome this complex jargon streamlining the project.
Lastly, go for clear contracts and agreements. NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) come in handy to protect your intellectual property. Also, state clearly the project timelines fees, and law compliance issues. Communicate with your offshore partner whenever you need to ensure you are entirely compliant with the local laws.
Best Practices for Successful Offshore Mobile App Development
For successful offshore mobile app development, adopt the best practices used by industry leaders.
Establishing Clear Objectives and Requirements
Know your project needs before choosing any offshore development plans.
- Set out the clear goal of your project and what you want to achieve as a result.
- Decide who will be your target audience.
- Set a clear budget for the entire designing to deployment phase.
- Note down the functionalities your software solution would have.
- Common specs you want it to have
- Tech stack or language you want to use.
This will narrow down your list and help you to know which specialist you want.
As you know beforehand, you can translate all these to your offshore partners. Stating everything clearly in the initial phase can reduce many hassles and upcoming project challenges.
Building Strong Communication Channels
As you are working remotely, proper communication is a must. You need to conduct regular meetings and provide updates frequently about your feedback & requirements.
Use cutting-edge technologies and project management tools to handle the entire project overseas. Some of them are –
- Trello
- Jira
- Slack
- GitHub
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Drive
- Asana
Setting Realistic Timelines and Milestones
Set clear expectations and deadlines before starting the project. Define milestones for each task or group of tasks in each phase. Along with the timeframe, specify the outcome you are expecting. These shorter and more effective milestones can help you to track the project development. As well as it also helps the offshore team to stay above the deadlines.
Regularly review and track progress of the entire development process. And address any issues promptly. Before moving to the next milestones, solve all the problems in the ongoing one. This might take some time initially, but overall this will boost productivity levels of the development cycle.
Ensuring Comprehensive Testing
Before launching the application in the market, it must undergo rigorous testing methods. Some common testing methods include unit testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT). Understanding how each works can help you to streamline the development.
- Unit Testing: It is the most low-level testing method. Here, you check the intricate methods, functions, classes, and components of the software. It is generally cheaper and faster to operate.
- Integration Testing: In integration testing, you need to integrate the units to see if they work. For instance, checking how the services work when it is combined with the database. Usually, it is more expensive than unit testing.
- User acceptance testing (UAT): This one is more like beta testing and the final phase of the development process. Here, real users test the application to ensure the application meets business requirements, functions correctly, and provides a user-friendly experience.
Testing is not a one-time process. Continuous improvement and iteration maintains software quality. Regular testing throughout the development lifecycle and regular feedback from users helps the development team refine and improve the application over time.
Conclusion
Offshore mobile app development offers your business with intelligent growth-focused strategy. As you get access to a range of talented specialists, you can also cut down your costs to stay within budget. As offshore development plans help you 24/7, your project becomes easily scalable and management – flexible.
Though you might face some challenges initially but with effective practices you can easily solve those. By adopting offshore development processes, you get the complete chance to boost your market value with global professionals.
