The dedicated development team is one of the most widely used outsourcing models. When you hire a whole team of software development experts, you expect them to deliver a quality product in a reasonable time. To ensure that, you have to track the team performance.
Unfortunately, this task is often more complicated than we expect. Our analytics professionals at Gravum believe that there are no universal metrics to evaluate your outsourcing team productivity. However, there are several techniques to determine whether your developers are efficient enough. Let’s figure out how to evaluate your outsourcing cost-effectiveness and figure out how to monitor and improve your end-product quality.
1. QA Kickback Rate: Find Out How Strong Your Engineers Really Are
When your developers close the development task and commit changes, you can consider the job done, right? Well, not exactly. The point is, if your quality assurance department is working clockwork, they won’t let any bug come through. So, QA engineers will just return the malfunctioning feature back to developers for fixing.
This is where it becomes interesting: imagine your developers spent 8 hours for the 9-hour task. Terrific, isn’t it? Well, your QA team found a vulnerability that took your outsourcing team 4 more hours to fix. These cases are quite common in the nowadays outsourcing with the dedicated team model.
Here are two reasons why you should consider it as an analysis opportunity rather than an issue:
- It is normal for QA to find bugs from time to time. After all, there won’t be such a thing, if there were no malfunctioning products to test;
- This is a performance indicator. The more times QA returns feature to developers, the worse their productivity is. You can track this data to make conclusions about your team performance.
2. Customer Satisfaction Indicator
We all try our best to figure out how great our dedicated teams are, but we often forget about the primary objective of software development. We forget about customer satisfaction.
Here’s the kicker: no matter how efficient and professional your developers are, if they can’t deliver the features that meet customer requirements in a timely matter, this is worth nothing. Here’s the main idea: customer satisfaction is your ultimate goal. Therefore, this is a very positive signal if your team copes with keeping the client happy.
On the other hand, constant customer complaints may indicate poor development or communication process. Keep in mind, that client dissatisfaction concerning the software delivery deadlines and quality is the last thing you want to experience.
3. Whole Development Cycle Time: Mind the Time From Completed To Deployed
We all often rely on time-tracking apps to understand how much time our dedicated teams spent on specific tasks. Our experts at Gravum believe that there is more to this: we also should consider the time that takes developers to deploy the feature to the production environment.
Here’s why this is essential:
- Deployment always takes time. Whether you hire a dedicated team in Ukraine, India, USA or anywhere else – software delivery is a time-consuming process and can hardly be instant;
- Delivery time impacts deadlines. Your development team can make the deadline of 10 days and then spend 2 more to deliver results. This will make you go behind on time frames.
4. Historical Data Analysis: Comparison As Your Measurement Tool
If you have some experience in software development outsourcing, you might find some useful data in your management apps. To be exact, the historical data of tasks completion.
The logic is primitive: you aggregate your time data by the task type and receive a median, that indicates an average time your team is supposed to spend on a similar task in general. If the value is smaller, congratulations, your team exceeds the plan in terms of performance. However, if they spend more time, you should take a profound look into the processes involved. This will help you to figure out the issue and avoid mistakes in the future.
Dedicated Development Team Model Outsourcing Costs. How These Metrics Impact Expenses
The thing is dedicated team charges per time spent on the project. This model implies that you can’t estimate the exact amount of money you are going to spend. However, judging by your team performance, you can estimate your expenses quite accurately.
The whole reason to track the mentioned metrics is they all are time-related, and you are paying for this time. With that said, the less your developers waste time on unimportant and inefficient moves, the better. You should keep an eye on these figures and take action where needed.
The Bottom Line
The success of any dedicated team – whether from Ukraine, China, India, or wherever you can imagine – depends not only on the developer expertise but also on the monitoring and proactive behavior of the management staff. Make sure you estimate your dev team efficiently and take proper actions to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of the services you achieve.
if you need professional assistance in the development outsourcing, reach out to Gravum. We provide quality dedicated development team for the projects of all scales and are always ready to make an IT-world a better place.
