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Growing businesses are always looking for opportunities to effectively grow their companies by acquiring technologies and custom software solutions. There is a broad range of software development services that you can apply – an in-house team, outstaff developers who will augment your existing in-house team to fulfill the lacking resources, and a dedicated software development team – the outsourcing developers who will work on your project from discovery to delivery.
A dedicated development team is supposed to be one of the most popular and efficient types of cooperation with software houses to enable business processes to scale.
Dedicated development is about the speed and quality of software development, which are pivotal criteria for growing businesses. In this article, we would like to explore the specifics of a dedicated software development team in order to determine how to organize dedicated software development team to work with your business.
How does dedicated software development work?
Basically, the dedicated development type of cooperation entails the integration of the remote dedicated development team within your inner process in order to build and deliver software solutions for your business needs. Nevertheless, it doesn’t exclude the availability of an in-house development team or certain software engineers.
For instance, if your business is young, and you haven’t integrated any type of software system yet, then we don’t recommend hurrying with hiring inner software developers as you can completely entrust this process to the outsourcing development team. But if your business has been on the market for a particular period of time, and you managed to build the face of your brand, then you probably already use some business automation tools which require constant technical support, thereby hiring in-house software engineers for the full-time job.
Selecting a dedicated development team services avoids the burden of looking for required specialists, testing their knowledge and capabilities, recruiting them, onboarding your inner processes and software projects, managing the team and monitoring their work on the project, finding places in the office, or renting the office, etc.
A dedicated team model entails a completely remote software development executed by the formed development team by your software vendor according to the specifications of your software project. In addition, the team can also be expanded, changed, or narrowed due to the variable requirements of your solution development.
Commonly, the dedicated development team that is accountable for building the software application from scratch includes the following dedicated project team structure:
- Business analysts – determining the project specifications and connecting the development team with the clients
- Project managers – lead the entire development process and engineers according to the project roadmap using team management approaches and tools
- Frontend engineers – build the visible part of your solutions, meaning the user interface
- Backend engineers – build the code filling of your software system
- UX/UI designers – create branded intuitive design for your system, ensuring seamless use experience
- Quality assurance specialists – ensure the quality of the solution and each part of its functionality before delivery
- DevOps engineers – accountable for managing the development efforts of the engineers
Dedicated vs in-house development team
Disputes about what type of cooperation with software developers is better – an in-house development team for a dedicated development team can last forever. And some businesses consider in-house development teams as the only option for building business software solutions, while others boldly entrust the business software development to outsourcing vendors.
Before we start exploring the pros and cons of each of these cooperation models, we would like to emphasize that custom software development always requires much investment and time to build a highly functional business solution that will correlate with all your current business needs, and is able to be changed and expanded due to your business grows.
So that starts with an in-house development team and its options. In house development team is just like any department of your company. It includes a certain number of employees that are accountable for different parts and stages of the development process. These employees expect to be paid on a monthly basis according to the current salary market in months.
You cannot replace the current software developers every month and a quarter if your internal team is lacking the technical, expertise or experience that is required for further development. Overall, the in-house development team sets certain limits for you that restrain the development potential and business development perspective.
A dedicated development team means you outsource your software development process to the remote team. However, here’s an option: a dedicated development team can work separately on a particular project for your business as well as work together with your inner development team or inner software developers who are just liking the resources or technical knowledge. In the last case, you may not need to supply the entire development team within your business, as you can hire several developers to maintain the software solutions but not completely develop them from scratch.
A dedicated team model means that your outsourced team is obliged to define a complete development team that includes all required engineers with the needed technical experience, knowledge, and all the skills to perform your project, and these engineers will not be occupied in any other project, meaning they will work directly on your project.
Also, a dedicated development team model entails a different type of partnership contract, where you as a client commit to long-term cooperation with the team of software vendors you selected. So you can expect fixed hourly rates for the period of your cooperation according to the contract, developers that can be replaced if any of the developers doesn’t correlate to your expectations, and temporary team extension if the current dedicated development team lacks resources, constant communication between your company and dedicated developers, etc.
Types Of Dedicated Teams
As we mentioned above, there are different types of cooperation with a dedicated development team provided by your outsourced team. The selection of the required type certainly depends on the ongoing needs of your business, whether you are willing to expand the inner team to build a project or develop the software solution from scratch.
At Altamira, we are always open to adjusting to clients’ demands and offering them the relevant team structure for their cases. Further, we would like to take a closer look at what kinds of dedicated software development teams exist and how they differentiate.
Team extension
This type of dedicated team cooperation model suits businesses that have already acquired any type of software system and built an inner team of web developers. The reason why you may need this type of service even maintaining the in-house team is simple – not enough inner resources, skills, or technical expertise.
Remote developers will smoothly integrate within your inner team and software project workflows for the period of time your company requires. Thus, the management of remote full-time developers and your inner tech team completely relies on your company.
Dedicated Team
Altamira has built dedicated software development teams hundreds of times. This team model entails providing your software project with a complete development team with specialists proficient in the skills and technology stack the project demands. This team will work directly on your project, with no occupation in other tasks and development processes.
A fully dedicated team model perfectly suits long-term projects when you’re ready to cooperate for more than 6 months. This team model is always of cost-efficient choice; the hourly rates under the DDT cooperation are lower than team extension (outstaffing), for instance, and also these rates can be fixed from your case if you’re common for 12+ months of partnership. In addition, the team onboarding and management are on our shoulders, meaning you don’t waste time on recruiting, hiring process, managing, replacing, or counting salaries.
Benefits of a dedicated team for your project
Dedicated development is supposed to be one of the most demanding and popular types of cooperation with software houses. Foremost, it is caused by its suitability for any business industry and size, any software project, and its scope of work. Therefore, we would like to name the top advantages of the dedicated team model which make it so appealing to clients with diverse requests.
Predictable project budget
As we already mentioned, a dedicated team saves your expenses. For example, at Altamira, we provide different hourly rates for team extension and dedicated team projects where a dedicated team is always more cost-efficient due to commitment to long-term cooperation. Also, we pick the developers with the appropriate experience and expertise within the available budget, alerting you about the possible growth of rates in the future.
Moreover, you work with dedicated developers as much time as your software project requires, allowing you to pay for the actual hours of work, with no need to pay monthly salaries to outsourcing developers, compared to in-house ones.
Flexible conditions of partnership
At Altamira, we always insist on the flexibility of a partnership with our dedicated teams, and these are not just empty words. Foremost, you as a client can boldly choose the developers that will work on your project, conduct interviews, look through CVs, test the skills, etc. Nobody will include the relevant specialists in your dedicated team. Also, if during the development process your team lacks the resource or certain tech knowledge, the dedicated team can easily be augmented with the required engineers, whose recruiting and onboarding rely on your software vendor.
Regular and transparent communication
As the dedicated team works directly on your project, they put the communication between the client and the team at the center of their attention. Everything that happens on the project cannot be left unattended and must be transparent for the client side.
The dedicated team is accountable for conducting weekly report meetings about the completed tasks, sprints, and other updates on the project, planning meetings to discuss the further steps, providing various flexible channels for communications, using task trackers and project management tools which data is also available for the client, etc.
Best countries to hire dedicated software development teams
What is great about dedicated development is that you get access to an unlimited number of tech talents from all over the world. Surely, if you need to expand your inner team, based on our experience, we don’t recommend hiring different engineers from different companies while engineers of the same software development company can live in different countries.
As a client, you are not attached to any location of the company or its employees, you choose the development team but their experience, skills, and knowledge only. The responsibility for all team managing aspects falls to the software vendor. Hence, we prepared a compilation of the best countries where you can find top-notch technical talents.
Ukraine
Ukraine is considered to be one of the best outsourcing destinations for many reasons. Foremost, Ukrainian developers are much devoted to technical education, entering technical specialties in universities, passing educational courses to enable their skills and expand their technical expertise, and also Ukrainian software houses dedicate resources and effort to grow the knowledge and skills of their employees.
To this day, the Ukraine tech talent pool counts more than 200,000 high-grade developers proficient in advanced technological trends like C++, PHP, Python, Java, and innovations including AI, ML, cloud computing, IoT, blockchain, data governance, image recognition, and others.
Poland
When looking for reliable countries to ensure your business software development, Poland would be in practically each of these lists. Compared to Ukrainian developers, Polish software houses offer the same categories of engineers, but the hourly rates are higher, up to $15-$20. Nevertheless, developers from Poland also focus a lot on the quality of their technical education and skills in order to deliver top-notch software development services according to international standards and trends.
Slovakia
Slovakia combines both options for software development services. It is a center of good-quality software houses while this country also conducts lots of international technical conferences where top developers hold discussions, share tips and experiences, and so on. The majority of software companies are located in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. By the way, Altamira also has a branch located in Bratislava, where you can personally meet the outsourcing team before and during the cooperation.
Surely, this is just a little list of the countries that are worthy of your attention when looking for a dedicated software development team for your project. However, we don’t recommend you concentrate just on certain counties or cities. The deal is in the technical expertise and industry experience of the software house you are going to partner with.
For example, there is a great platform called Clutch where all software houses from different countries are combined. This resource provides real testimonials from previous clients, current hourly rates, approximate project estimation and durations, available technologies, software development company services, etc. Therefore, you can just sort the companies by several relevant filters and get the list of potential dedicated software development teams for your case.
When you need dedicated software development teams
As we already mentioned, a dedicated type of development team suits various software projects due to its flexibility at any stage of the software development life cycle. Mostly, a dedicated software development team approach is applied for long-term software development projects that may have little scope of work that can scale in the future. So when is the best time for your business to partner with a dedicated team? Keep reading as further we are going to name the indicators of such projects.
Startups in the early stage
If you have a formed startup business with a structured inner process, and you are willing to scale your business and integrate custom automated software, then a dedicated software development team perfectly suits you. This type of cooperation with software vendors saves your time on the hiring process, onboarding, and starting the development, it is adjustable to your core business needs and requirements and can be executed within the available budget.
Software project with variable specifications
There are lots of cases when businesses miss the discovery stage of the software development life cycle which entails approving the software product/solution idea, checking its market fit, exploring competitors, and therefore determining project requirements. In this case, a dedicated software development team is tasked with conducting the discovery stage, even if the development process was previously started by your inner developers or another outsourcing team. Commonly, this stage is the most pivotal and durable as it builds the plan for each next step within the project.
Long-term projects
Long-term scalable software projects and dedicated software development team are a perfect match. Foremost, dedicated developers that are committed to long-term cooperation have lower hourly rates, which also can be fixed under certain conditions. In this case, the dedicated team is accountable for each stage of the software development life cycle to be done on time, within budget, and with quality. Moreover, after the solution delivery, you can still collaborate with the support team that will regularly fix system errors and other system upgrades.
Why is Altamira the best option for dedicated development?
Being a reliable software development partner for a longer period of time, Altamira got experience in building dedicated development teams for numerous projects. Despite the dedicated software development team model having certain conditions and structures, we offer our clients flexible conditions of cooperation, taking into account the specifics of their businesses and software demands.
As an experienced team, we are completely sure of the development services and the quality we offer. Hence, by choosing Altamira’s dedicated software development team, we ensure the following:
- Project budget optimization – overall dedicated development team model is cost-efficient, as you save money on recruiting and supplying the team with salaries, but we guaranteed following your business requirements within the available budget and no budget expansion can be done without your approval;
- Scalable tech talent pool – we are growing the company that focuses on top-notch development services when hiring new engineers, which is great for your project for two options – you will receive a high-quality solution and the dedicated team can quickly be scaled with the required specialist during your project development;
- Sharing the business goals – our dedicated developers do not just build the regular software product\solution; we are on the same page with our clients and share their current business goals and priorities in order to deliver a functional solution that will resolve the inner issues and boost company productivity;
- We are flexible – our conditions of cooperation are variable, and we are ready to adjust to your ongoing needs and requirements in the duration of the development, development team members, etc.
Summary
Overall, hiring a dedicated development team is a perfect match for fast-growing businesses that are willing to acquire custom software solutions in the short term in order to boost the company’s growth. We are not saying that a dedicated development team is the only variant of cooperation, but it still has lots of advantages, supplying your software project with all required engineers and building high-quality software for your core business needs and requirements at optimal cost.
Nevertheless, if you still have any doubt about the team model that would suit your software project best, we can schedule a quick call to discuss your expectations and outline the type of cooperation that will match your ongoing requirements.