Introduction:
Are you grappling to maintain dependencies between your company and the external team?
If you’re unable to correct those common mistakes then this blog is for you!
Both IT staff augmentation and software development outsourcing requires the hiring company to manage dependencies that may arise during the development stage. This ensures operational efficiency.
Dependencies between the hiring company and external team may vary, but they must keep in mind that the synchronization is maintained. Before diving into the five costly mistakes, let’s differentiate between IT staff augmentation and remote outsourcing. Whenever we mention outsourcing or remote teams, we are talking about offshore development teams.
In both cases, there’s a company that hires an external team to work on their project, for example, an entire software solution or a custom website. In IT staff augmentation, the company has full command over the external team whereas in remote teams, they have little control.
Remote teams are cost-effective but come with locational and temporal challenges.
Benefits of Both Software Development Outsourcing & IT Staff Augmentation:
Cost: Is offshore outsourcing the most economically viable and reliable way to develop your software? Yes, yes it is. Compared to IT staff Augmentation which goes through the traditional hiring process to recruit developers. The latter is costly.
Long-term Need: Remote development teams typically prefer not to use contractors for long-term projects. Whereas IT staff augmentation prefers to keep the expertise inhouse for long-term projects.
Need for Specialized Talent: With outsourcing, the hiring can access the Global talent pool that is more tailored to their specific needs. Whereas the Inhouse teams need to be trained or replaced.
What are Dependencies?
In the context of software development outsourcing, software development and IT staff Augmentation, dependencies refer to the relationships between various components, tasks or teams that may have an impact on how a project is executed.
Understanding these dependencies is important as they can affect timelines, resource allocation & overall project success.
5 Common yet Costly Mistakes that you may be making:
1. Version Conflicts: Different software packages or libraries may require versions of a dependency which leads to problems. Resolving these problems can be tricky.
How to Avoid it: Use a version control system (VCS) for example, ‘Git’ that tracks changes and facilitates collaboration amongst the developers.
2. Outdated Dependencies: Are you still relying on outdated dependencies? These can expose your project to security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues.
How to Avoid it: Make sure that you don’t use softwares that are beyond saving, i.e that can’t be upgraded, software maintenance should be continuous. The outdated tech should be salvageable.
3. Large Dependency Trees: Overly-complex or obtuse dependency trees with many layers can obstruct your development process and slow it down.
How to Avoid it: Simplify your dependency trees by breaking them down into small, understandable layers.
4. Inadequate Communication: This is a costly mistake, poor communication will further lead to misunderstandings that can affect your project, like delays & inefficiencies. Hiring remote developers can help attenuate this problem.
How to Avoid it: Use communication tools like Slack or Asana that will help in real-time communication and updates amongst team members.
Conduct frequent meetings to discuss the problems, challenges or flaws. Open dialogue needs to be encouraged so that no team member feels left out. Make sure you get the opinions of every team member.
5. Failing to establish clear priorities: Without clearing and defining project priorities, team members may focus on the wrong components, causing major dependencies to be overlooked. This can lead to project delays and further bloating of the budget.
How to Avoid It: Establishing clear objectives can help mitigate any misunderstandings. Using frameworks like ‘MoSCoW’ to categorize tasks based on their importance and urgency.
Dependencies that are often overlooked:
Unmaintained Packages: Some software packages may no longer be kept maintained, this can come and bite you later down the line.
Missing Dependencies: Failing to include necessary dependencies in your project, this is when your end-result looks like frankenstein, an abomination.
Compatibility Issues: Dependencies which are not at all compatible with your main framework can lead to errors and bugs.
Lack of Documentation: This lack of documentation like technical guides, tutorials relating to a dependency can make it too hard to understand to use it as required.
Security Risks: Using dependencies that already come with vulnerabilities can expose your project to attacks.
Future trends in Dependency Management:
Artificial Intelligence: AI has been the hot topic in the IT industry, its rapid growth has been unprecedented, just like the space race of the Cold War, this isn’t just a trend – it’s another space race but with AI. Machine learning (ML) has been in the works to get integrated into the development process.
These two technologies can help to identify and manage dependencies more effectively by directly, at the lower-level, looking at code changes, project timelines and teamwork.
AI can forecast which looks like precognition, potential dependencies issues before they rise, allowing the team to act preemptively. Companies can use AI tools to suggest fixes for conflicts and streamline integration processes, reducing human intervention.
Microservices & Modular Architectures: There has been a recent shift towards microservices & modular architectures that has continued to rise, this approach simplifies the complexity of dependencies, by smaller and modular components. Making it easier to find and fix issues.
Teams can work independently on various services, resulting in faster development cycles, which companies can leverage and release the product faster than their competitors
DevOps & Agile: Companies increasingly have been integrating DevOps and agile methods to enhance the teamwork between development teams and operations. This opens the door towards cross-functional teams. Continuous integration of these approaches automates testing and development processes, allowing the team to quickly fix any problems.
Cloud-Computing: The rise of cloud computing has contributed to the adoption of cloud-native architectures which allows applications to deploy in the cloud. Cloud-native solutions will predictably be useful in scaling resources.
Cloud-based tools further enhance real-time teamwork among the external teams and the hiring company, eliminating transparency-based dependencies.
Conclusion:
To Conclude, in IT staff augmentation and Outsourcing, dependencies will arise that require fixing and avoiding common mistakes which can be costly. We discussed five of them and how to avoid these five mistakes. We defined what dependencies are in the context of augmentation and outsourcing. We talked about the benefits of both approaches in the beginning.
The rise of AI and automation, along with cloud computing has made handling dependencies easier which will make the field more competitive in the near-future.
As the editor of the blog, She curate insightful content that sparks curiosity and fosters learning. With a passion for storytelling and a keen eye for detail, she strive to bring diverse perspectives and engaging narratives to readers, ensuring every piece informs, inspires, and enriches.
