Opportunities and Challenges of Offshore Development: Key Considerations

The offshore development model is popular because it offers a company exposure to technical talents available across the globe. Any representative mobile app development company India or other emerging countries can showcase at the global level is likely to be benefited from this offshore development model. The offshore projects even make the main source of revenue for several companies in these countries. 

Why leading companies go for offshore development model? What are the key benefits of building an enterprise mobile app with the input from developers located in different global locations? Let us have a look at the key opportunities offshore development model offers. 

• Pulling a variety of developer talents and different approaches to achieve sophistication and advanced user experience.

• The competitive advantage of pushing the development credentials into the global stage.

• Fulfilling strategic objective of incorporating different cultures, aesthetic notions and user experience standards.

• Keeping abreast with the latest and most advanced development practices and standards. 

While the reasons and impetus to opt for offshore development is already evident and clear to us, there is a severe lack of understanding among companies about the basic requirements of offshore development. Clearing these misconceptions and understanding the basic requirements for offshore development is important. Let's have a look at the following aspects. 

• You do not need to revamp your on-site development to ensure success with offshore development model. Such a notion is absolutely ill-conceived and baseless.

• Offshore development requires you to lay out the best practices about code quality, documentation and collaboration at the very beginning.

• You need to make a schedule for the communication and collaborative sessions between on-site and offshore teams to prevent time overlapping and discord.

• The coding practices and coding standards followed by your company should be communicated well in advance and preferably to the offshore developer team supposed to work in your project.

• Instead of going all out for a large team of developers it is always better to go for the smaller team with a few talented developers who can work as the nucleus to develop a team of developers later on when you need.

• Don't let your offshore team feel isolated and secluded from your on-site processes. To create an inclusive and collaborative atmosphere delegate them tasks from your existing projects.

• Always hire an offshore development team with a credible track record and proven expertise in building most sophisticated apps in your niche. 

For large enterprise mobile app development projects that require cross-country, cross-cultural and multifarious developer inputs for a global output, you need to deal with the following challenges. Let us briefly mention here the key challenges and their respective remedies.

• Overlapping working hours due to different time zones is a common challenge faced by many offshore development projects. Making a plan to support such differences in working hours and scheduling tasks accordingly are the remedy of this issue.

• Addressing the linguistic and cultural differences between offshore and on-site developers is a problem that can have an overbearing effect on communication. Organising collaborative sessions and training on-site developers to remain abreast with a foreign culture is a remedy of this issue.

• Maintaining coding standard and development quality to the optimum is another big challenge when hiring an offshore team. Hiring an experienced and expertise-driven team with a proven track record and establishing the development parameters and coding standards well in advance is the remedy to this problem.

Conclusion

As the enterprise mobile app development is increasingly getting competitive and demanding, the offshore development is a model no quality focused company can refute. But meeting the above-mentioned challenges to ensure optimum quality is what seems to be the key.