Tips for enhancing the productivity of dedicated development teams: Practical advice

The most challenging troubles of hiring a dedicated development teams relate to the tracking developer’s productivity and how to simulate the quality of works.

In the software development sector, the right IT outsourcing vendor might save roughly 60% of project costs for your business. For team-based projects, which do not fix the ended date to complete all the tasks, productivity and effective project management are seemingly the core indicator of accessing a dedicated development team.

In practice, the majority of IT experts claim that the model of a dedicated team brings cost-effective to businesses, which is ideal for long-term software development projects. With the dedicated development team model, you have full control capacity of the outsourcing projects, including workflows and decisions. Additionally, you can easily add or subtract any team member, following your skillset requirement.

However, working with remote developers consists of the concern of whether the dedicated teamwork optimal their productivities. In fact, since you should pay for every working hour, not the final results, simulating the productivity will save your money. So, how to optimize team performance? We will show you four practical tips for enhancing the capacity of the dedicated development team by 50%.

Making sure dedicated development teams respect the priority

In the beginning, almost industry experts believe that productivity depending on the satisfaction of software developers with companies and the workplace environment. Hence, the software outsourcing company should steadily simulate the internal policy for celebrating and rewarding the efforts of employees. In which, encouraging work and life balance refers to the beneficial activities to generate innovative and productive dedicated software development teams.

In practice, many software development companies have the confession box inside the workplace, that the employees can propose wishes and aspirations to leaders. Otherwise, they can express their feeling to reduce work pressure. Besides, companies should also organize surveys, question polls, or gamification for collecting feedback to timely detect the problems, which potentially adversely affect the productivities.

Leveraging tools to enhance the productivity of offshore dedicated development teams

In the digital world, software development companies recently use a series of tools, assisting the efficiency of collaboration among members. We generate here with the regular software, you should consider:

1. Jira / Redmine: including division of tasks, their descriptions, and priorities. It commonly uses for those who need notification of the status change. While Redmine seemingly includes complexities during the setup process, JIRA set up is a breeze in any OS with a fee.
2. Wunderlist: used for creating additional optional lists of smaller tasks and Ideal for integration. Its free plan comes with a ton of features and most of the features (reminders, tags, attachments, notes, voice recording, email to tasks, etc.). You can also consider choosing a premiere plan with extra features to start.
3. Toggl / Harvest: A necessary tool for ongoing control of project costs and a budget summary. It is remarkably straightforward to summarize the entire time spent on a particular task via a time tracking feature. Harvest is a popular, web-based application for SMEs, while Toggl is a well-developed tool for extensive projects.
4. Hipchat / Slack / Skype / Hangout/Zoom: communication tools for video conferences, sharing information, and discussing ideas. Necessary for the rapid exchange of shared media for the teams. The Slack business platform is especially suitable for smaller project teams, supporting other popular applications such as Dropbox, Google Hangouts, and iMessage. The free version of Hangouts and Skype only supports small participants (10 for skype and 25 for Hangouts), while the Zoom account can work with 100 participants.
5. Confluence / Redmine Wiki: commonly use in extensive and more intricate projects, it is worth to gather all the expertise and knowledge in one place. The ideal tool here is Confluence, which, combined with Jira, provides fitting opportunities to supplement the knowledge on specific tasks or IT solutions.
6. Gitlab / Jenkins: It is a useful supplement for tracking the progress of tasks in Jira or Redmine. Jenkins is a free and open-source CI/CD tool used for software development. If in case of a larger organization and bigger teams they choose GitLab because of security and performance and usage.
7. Google Drive/ Dropbox: it is for files sharing and storing, which work in multi-devices. With Dropbox, you retain full ownership of your stuff, while Google drive asks a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works.

Related article: Dedicated development team vs. In-house developers: What is the best for enterprise software development  

Respecting the process and Agile development methodology in software outsourcing

In managing software development, scientific pieces of evidence have proved that proper development models, including Agile, Scrum, and Kanban enhancing the productivity and flexibility in developing offshore software solutions. Indeed, agile development methodology brings tremendous benefits for reinforcing creativity, team spirit, and enthusiasm, which connect the dedicated team members. Those companies respecting agile and Scrum software development tend to achieve prominent code quality and collaboration frameworks.

On the other hand, the contribution of the smooth operation process internally seemingly the core value of the Agile concept. Whereas, the process should be taking into account the below criteria:

1. Clearly define the role of each team member, which put team lead as a centric factor being responsible for keeping the dedicated team on tract timely.
2. Comprehensively interpret every corner of customer requirements. Whereas, the team can save time for rewriting and debugging.
3. Strictly Adherence a certain standard, beginning with analysis requirement, release management, development, then ending with testing.
4. Spend time to build clear project plans with thorough task allocation.
5. Create a unique code standard and guidelines that fit with the internal status of companies and teams.
6. Develop the strategies of smooth integration in case of having new members.
7. Apply the defined metrics to measure the team performance, including time, cost, function points, and more.

Related article: Working with a dedicated software development team

Accelerating the project documentation and reusable components

Before starting any development process, the Agile framework suggests the team composing the project documentation, which can be known as the execution specification. Despite the time-consuming during documentation creation, the dedicated development team could enhance the quality while reducing the cost during development term since it draws the detailed vision of projects’ content and scope.

On the other hand, the modern programming sector gives birth to the concept of reusable code, which helps developers cut down the time for developing some parts of the software. The reusable component can be stored as the discrete pieces, accessing via API. In practice, developers seemingly leverage source code in rapidly building software for cost-saving and development speed acceleration.