How to choose your software development partners and not to fail with the results?

If you already have a great idea for a software application in mind, the next important step is to find the right team to execute your plan. So, when choosing whom to delegate the work with your IT project, there are several alternatives:

– own team of developers;
– freelance players;
– local fintech agency;
– outsourced software development company.

Let’s look at all the variants to consider the pros and cons based on the arguments, collected within years of work in software development.

Own development team

Once you post an advertisement about hiring a development team, you’ll take time to get them up to speed, train, code, test, and most important, audit the final solution before the launch. And don’t forget that you have to pay the salary and taxes for the team from day one. An undeniable advantage will be the close acquaintance of developers with the ecosystem for which the program is written, and the intellectual idea will be safer. And the apparent downside is long-term recruitment, tax payments, rental of premises for the team, medical insurance, and others. All this falls on your shoulders. But even if you have a large enough budget, it doesn’t mean that you will be able to assemble a good team without great recruiters and a beneficial salary package, as the IT specialists are very discerning nowadays.

Freelancers

You can find candidates for fintech apps on the freelance job portals. This hiring is suitable for the short term, to do urgent work or take on irregular support. Freelancer-developers have more experience, but hiring a freelancer, you have to accept that you are not the only customer and your project will be only part of his/her attention. If a freelancer is offered more money, he can abruptly reject your project. Another issue is the proficiency of the freelancer. You need to be a senior developer yourself to properly evaluate the qualification of the hired coders. Often you need to hire an additional tester to check their code, and most importantly, there is no guarantee that you’ve chosen the experts. Remember to sign a non-disclosure agreement with freelancers!

The local fintech development company

It could be any company in your city or country. Such a team will work without a time-zone gap. With the local US companies, creating the software solution is fast and effective but very costly. As the US developers are the best-paid teams. And even a minimally viable product can demand as much as the whole solution from the less prominent, but not less experienced European team.

The outsourced software development company

Such an expert company is optimal for developing a relevant application, for example, a trading platform. It’s an entire team of developers, business analysts, designers, and so on, working for you on the business agreement. So, no vacations, seek leaves, etc., and you do not need to dismiss your own staff when everything is ready, working with the small group of in-house experts with as many outsourced developers as you wish.

This is the most common type of hiring in the financial application development market. It costs less and can be more effective if you invite the professionals. Of the cons, this can be the time zone difference, work with the project manager as a middleman, and online calls instead of direct negotiations. But with online demos, we are working on for some years now, even with our own employees. So, it’s not a problem anymore.

The location of the developer team influences the cost of developing the FinTech app. You will be offered a starting price of $500,000 per banking app in the US. And in India, they will make the same product for $105,000. But there is a possibility that in one case, you will overpay, and in the other, you will not get an application of inadequate quality. So, the compromise could be to stick to some European executives with a prominent reputation. About the budget, you need to set the software requirement specification to put there all your wishes. Well, no plan’s perfect. But some essential steps and moments that should never be overlooked.

Choosing a niche

Make a portrait of the target audience, monitor competitors, discuss the future product with your colleagues, and collect all the wishes to describe your idea to the development team. Everyone should understand exactly what it will do and be used for. The development team will design app features and functionality. The result will be composed of technical specification (SRS) for the development of the product.

Prototype

The purpose of this iteration is to show what the product will look like. Focus on developing user experience and UI. All potential of this stage is aimed at creating a visualization of the app and ends with the design of mockups.

Programming and testing

At this stage, the program’s architecture is coming close to reality. Quality assurance demands add the requirements for coding of separate parts, and programmers implement them. All the functional blocks are tested separately and together. The software audit is the point at the end of the coding to be sure that the application is done in compliance with the requirements, reliable, stable, and invulnerable to the hacker’s attacks.   

Launch and support the product

In this final stage, when all the tests are done, the bugs are dismissed, and the app is ready to be represented to the world. Think about how to stimulate users to give their feedback. Based on their comments, create the backlog of future improvements for your product, and organize the technical support for the urgent issues. This strategy of improving and updating the app will naturally advance the development and increase its popularity. For this phase, you’ll need about 25% of the total funding, and here will work such as the introduction of new features, support, analytics, monitoring, and updating the application. You become less competitive without optimizing the app over time.

Some crucial points that should not be overlooked

Before the development, you need to ensure that all the regulations, security requirements, and data privacy terms are respected.

In this regard, pay attention to safe code writing, and the data encryption methods, and be sure to test and audit your product before launch.

Working with customer feedback, constantly improving your product. Regularly collect feedback from your target audience to see which features or interface elements interest users the most and the least.

About Nixon Holly

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