Reasons for outsourcing software engineering

The most common reason to outsource the project is to cut the cost. Though this might be the main reason there are also other reasons to for outsourcing the projects. Moreover cost saving through outsourcing is not guaranteed. In the real world failed outsourcing projects will cost much which will also lead to delays, missing opportunities and massive headaches. Successful outsourced projects require many elements like communication, organizational knowledge, and process among the team.

Here we can see the primary benefits of outsourcing the projects. This article is based on the experience on implementing hundreds of outsourced projects. Here are some good reasons to outsource the projects.

The broad term that covers many situations is team augmentation. A typical example for this is: when an organization is not able to find the right people locally. For example when you want to a built a project that involves lot of numerical understanding, but if you are not able to find the developer with requisite mathematical background in your area then there is no chance for you to manage the project with internal infrastructure. So this makes you to find an outsourcing partner who sufficient experience in doing this work.

If the company needs to expand quickly and want to deliver the projects in the shortest time available, it has to outsource its projects. So, temporary expansion of the development team is required which results in outsourcing the projects. Once the hard time is over the additional web developers are not needed. So hiring the web developers locally will be a big issue and it will also take lot of time. At the same time is a challenging task also to find a web developer for short term engagement locally.

There may arise some situation where a company may face some technical issues that are outside their core expertise and this simply makes them to outsource their projects. Some of the specific technical problems that might develop are development of performance in testing harnesses, writing of installers for different operation systems, or some other jobs like one off task which may require in depth knowledge in release to release.

Choosing the right outsourcing company as your partner will help you to reduce a significant amount of time, some estimation are 3:1 and 4:1. This large part of savings is due to varying salary rates for the software web developers. So there is financial benefit when the software project is outsourced. Outsourcing the project can certainly save some money but it is not a silver bullet. It is just a like other tool to get the things done perfectly and it should be handled with care in the area where it is more appropriate.

Not all the projects need to be outsourced; the riskiest projects that last long only for several weeks to a couple of months need not to be outsourced. At the same time the projects that require two or one engineer need not to be outsourced. This is because the process and the predictable communication tend to dominate the schedule and there is no investment.