Software Development Outsourcing – on Target, on Budget
If you lack internal software development resources or expertise to support your business growth or digital transformation initiatives, Cloudteam is ready to take over your development projects (either the entire pipeline or it’s part) and ensure the effectiveness and transparency of our cooperation.
Software Development Outsourcing Service Models We Offer
Staff augmentation: Fill in the skill gap of your in-house resources with the best offshore talents assigned to your projects full-time and managed by you directly.
Dedicated team: Expand your software development capabilities and minimize management efforts. We provide you with a dedicated development team managed by a PM on our side who regularly reports to you and consults on all important decisions in the project.
Full process outsourcing: Focus on your core business activities while we set up the whole development process and take full responsibility for the project and all related risks.
Our vision of software development outsourcing
We can take over all your software development processes and cater for every project within your IT project pipeline. Throughout the cooperation, we aim to ensure the smooth flow of your projects while delivering new applications on time and budget and adding new features to your existing applications frequently (say, 2-6 weeks depending on your needs). Outsourcing your project pipeline will help you use your internal resources more efficiently and access world-class technologies without hiring and training new employees.
Transparent outsourcing with KPIs and SLOs as its core: With experienced project managers, flexible resource management, and structured collaboration among all project participants, we build our internal processes the way that allows us to be self-managed. At the same time, the outcomes we deliver are transparent and easily controllable. We design a comprehensive system of KPIs fit for your needs and agree on service level objectives (SLOs). Later, we target SLOs to deliver the outcomes you need, while you use KPIs and SLOs to control service delivery without being deeply involved in it.
Collaboration is key: Cooperating with you and your vendors, we build friendly and open communication and avoid creating conflicts. We can either work with your business users and subject matter experts directly or through your IT department as an intermediary.
What our offering includes
Delivering our software development outsourcing services, we support two formats of projects:
New applications: we develop applications from scratch, put them into production, and evolve further.
Existing software: we support and evolve existing software.
Both formats of our services can involve the following components:
Business analysis
We can run BA on our own or in cooperation with your in-house BA specialists. For each project, we allocate BAs who specialize in the relevant areas to interview project stakeholders and elicit all business and user requirements. Then, we perform an all-round investigation of the business problems and propose possible IT solutions. After you choose the solution that suits your budget, functionality, and time expectations, we prepare detailed specifications for a development team.
Software development process and management
In every project, we perform UX and UI design, build architecture as well as run coding, integration, and deployment. We run the overall project management and report to you on the progress of each project.
We work according to a wide range of development methodologies, including Agile and DevOps, and apply CI/CD approaches to speed up software delivery. Focusing on iterative development, we can deliver the first version of a new application within 6-9 months since the project ramp-up and provide further enhancements every 2-6 weeks. Our developers are always enthusiastic about new technologies and non-trivial architectures to maximize the value that the developed applications bring to your business, however focusing on software reliability first. While our account managers ensure and report on the compliance of the whole project pipeline with your strategic software development goals.
QA process and management
You can either include QA into your outsourcing contract with Cloudteam or leave it with your in-house QA team or your QA vendor, in which case we will collaborate with them throughout all project stages. We employ a holistic approach to QA which means not only testing each application but also preventing problems in software architecture and code to achieve SLOs.
In our team, QA matters to everyone involved (BAs, PMs, developers, testers, infrastructure engineers, etc.). Our QA activities start as early as the requirements gathering stage to ensure your needs are properly covered. Our developers hold regular unit tests and code reviews. We perform continuous testing within the development process, including functionality, performance, usability, integration, compatibility, and security testing. We also apply an appropriate amount of test automation to speed up delivery and bring a number of missed bugs down to a minimum.
We quarterly assess our QA processes and adjust them. All our QA activities are aimed at achieving maximum application availability as well as avoiding functional errors, low application performance, and poor quality of UX, architecture, and code.
Risk management
For each project separately and for the entire project pipeline, we define and estimate risks related to the project budget, delivery time, cybersecurity, new technologies, and personnel. Then, we prepare risk mitigation plans for each risk, monitor risks regularly, and report to responsible project stakeholders to keep all parties fully informed about existing risks and their states and ensure the consistency of risk management actions.
Change management
Together with your assigned representatives, we can co-manage the changes that your new or updated applications are likely to cause to your business operations and facilitate the digital transformation of your business processes. We can also conduct user training to improve user adoption.
We can fully manage all substantial changes in your applications: we discuss the changes with all parties concerned, define how the changes can influence the applications’ functionality, usability, security, and other aspects and then implement the changes.
And if there is a need to introduce any changes concerning a particular project or the whole project pipeline (e.g., to change project prioritization), we also make sure that such changes are promptly reviewed, carefully planned and performed.
Infrastructure configuration management
We can configure the IT infrastructure for application delivery using DevOps and CI/CD practices according to your guidelines, or make the existing infrastructure better suit development needs. We can also work within the infrastructure configured by your specialists or vendors (MSP), including within the DevOps approach.
Application support
Along with software development and modernization, we provide application support for every project and cover such aspects as administration, application monitoring, troubleshooting, application evolution, and multi-tier support.
Administration: conducting user management (say, authorizing new users and establishing access levels according to user roles), changing software configurations (e.g., changing pathways to databases after new releases).
Application monitoring: assessing the performance of your applications, detecting weak spots, and performance drops to eliminate them timely.
Troubleshooting: cleaning erroneous data from the database, fixing bugs.
Evolution: developing, testing, and deploying new features according to your change requests to ensure that your applications always stay relevant to your business needs.
Establishing multi-tier support (L2-L4) to better allocate support team resources and match support agents with the issues of their specialization.