After drawing up the terms of reference, the following difficulty arises – it is necessary to find a software development partner. With the seeming oversaturation of the Web development market, making the right choice turns out to be very difficult.
Indeed, how, without having competence in the subject area, to determine whether the company that has made you a preliminary proposal is really competent. We constantly hear from the organizers of the tender:
What if the price is too high and the work really doesn’t cost that much? Or maybe it is artificially underestimated and you will be forced to endlessly pay extra for completing the functionality that was not included in the initial estimate? It is really difficult for an untrained person to figure it out.
Know what you want
However, if you took the time and put together a competent brief, then the matter is simplified. Now we will consider the key points to which you need to pay attention while choosing a professional software development company.
You need to order development in a studio that has more than one or two specialists on staff for each stage of development (project manager, designer, layout designer, content engineer, programmer). If you nevertheless decide to contact a small studio, ask them a direct question – what will happen to our project in the situation described above.
Partner with the company that understands you
When choosing a dedicated software development team, it is extremely not enough to familiarize yourself with the portfolio. What pitfalls there can be:
First, a portfolio can be trite fake. To check its authenticity, you just need to call the companies listed in the portfolio. But this is not enough! Because:
Secondly, it often happens that a team that once developed a serious project in the studio’s staff was disbanded after the development was completed, or left itself, creating its own studio. That is, at the moment the studio may not have the same level of competence that was present at the time of the development of the portfolio project.
Understand where the development partner possesses expertise
For the above reasons, you should not blindly trust the top positions in various ratings. Although it is imperative to study them – the presence of a studio in the rating, although it does not guarantee the highest competence, is an additional factor of trust.
Now we again come to a visual assessment of the presence of real employees on the staff (sitting in the office!) And to their personal competencies.
Are they really that good?
In modern conditions, technologies are developing very quickly and it is physically impossible to deeply master several topics at once – one human life is not enough to study products developed by thousands of specialists around the world.
If a small studio with 5-7 people will convince you that they are equally good at several management systems and can put together a site at least on 1C-Bitrix, at least on Magento, at least on Joomla – DON’T BELIEVE! Most likely, they are equally weak in all the control systems they enumerate. Professionals in 8allocate are ready to solve any task.
Is the software developer financially stable?
The site is a working tool designed to make a profit, therefore, in addition to the design, it is necessary to evaluate the technical characteristics:
- adaptability (mobile friendly – very important today!);
- download speed;
- usability;
- functionality not visible from the public part;
- personal account, shopping cart, filters, site search and more.
By the way – the developer’s site itself is also an element of the portfolio, and the most eloquent one – if they have not tried hard for themselves, then they will not become even more for the customer. So “a shoemaker without boots” will not give a ride here … at all.
This is the key point of choice. Even those customers who declare and are sincerely convinced that the cost of the project is the last factor influencing the choice of the contractor, in fact, other things being equal, will still choose a lower price offer.
Conclusion
It’s up to you – you are ready to entrust the development of your project to a person whose competencies do not allow him to claim the salary generally accepted in the field of web development. These are, of course, approximate figures, you need to take into account the workload of the specialist and the scale of the project.
By the way, do not think that in regions with competencies equal to those in the capital, the level of a specialist’s income is several times lower.
