Experience in outsourcing software projects

Nowadays, with the increasing popularity of computers, more and more people gradually recognize the important role of software in daily management. If you are a manager of a large enterprise, you may need an ERP software to help you manage the enterprise. If you are a store operator, A storage and sales software may be required to collect statistics on daily operations. If you are a restaurant owner, you may need a set of catering management software for customer management and cost analysis. Because the operation and management of each industry have its own particularity, the existing general-purpose software may not meet your needs, in this case, you need to assign the software project to a professional software company or software team to complete the design. This is the software outsourcing that we often mention on a daily basis. I have worked in software development before and are familiar with the software industry. Therefore, many business people often entrust me to help them outsource software. Therefore, I have accumulated some outsourcing experience, now I want to share it with you, hoping to help anyone who needs software outsourcing. First, the first step of software outsourcing is to clarify the detailed requirements of the software. For example, if you want to use the software, what kind of functions are required for the software, and what special requirements are required for the software. Taking supermarket operators as an example, they are followed by hundreds of suppliers with thousands of consumers. How to use software to manage complicated suppliers and consumer customers, and how to fine-tune the circulation of commodities from a small seasoning package, such as import, sale, adjustment, and storage, these are the details of supermarket owners. In addition, sometimes you cannot analyze the software by yourself. You must discuss it with the business personnel who actually want to use the software so that the software developed in the future can play a real role.
Many of my friends around me have learned this kind of lesson in outsourcing practice: A friend who runs a mall said that he once outsourced a supermarket software. Because of his general needs, therefore, when the other party develops the software in a general supermarket, it finds that it does not meet the special needs of the supermarket only after tens of thousands of yuan of development. Another friend, because he didn't fully elaborate on the requirements at the beginning, waited until the software was developed and asked to add more features, while temporary addition of functionality meant additional costs, as a result, the RMB 10 thousand project cost tens of thousands of yuan at the end. These are some of the profound lessons we have learned from outsourcing. I hope that you can thoroughly analyze your software requirements and print them out with paper, and act as an attachment to the contract. This makes it easier for software owners to better analyze projects, develop software, and resolve disputes.
Second, it is necessary to clarify who should hand over the software for development. Some people often ask me whether the software is developed by a software company or by a software development team? In fact, this is mainly based on your actual situation. If you are a relatively large enterprise, or the features required by the software you want to develop are complex, or you have ample funds, you can find a powerful software company to undertake your project. Although the cost is higher, the quality of the project is more secure. If you don't have enough money, it is best to hand it over to the software development team. The software development team mentioned here refers to a software development group composed of some programmers and software experts. Most of them work part-time for software development, there are also some programming experts in software companies. Their feature is that charges are relatively low, but the technical aspect is not much different from that of software companies. Of course, there are also so-called SOHO people who specialize in programming at home. If your software features are relatively simple, you can also hand over the project to the individual SOHO for development, and the cost can be further reduced.
Where can I find these software development teams or software companies? In fact, there are actually a lot of websites dedicated to providing software outsourcing information, such as the ** network, as long as you send an outsourcing information above, a software company or software development team will soon contact you for a project. I once sent out several outsourcing information on the software business network. Every time I spent an hour, more than a dozen people came to contact me. The final deal price is cheaper because of fierce competition. In addition, there is another way to easily find the project owner, that is, join the QQ group of software and technical teams in various regions and talk directly to the programming experts in your city.
How can I select the most appropriate project receiver when many people contact you? The best way is to give your requirements to him for analysis to see if he can fully understand your requirements and express them in the technical language of programming. If this is done, you can continue to talk about it. Otherwise, contact another person. The project owner of the other party directly communicates with me and writes the requirements in detail, we repeatedly negotiate with each other until I am fully satisfied and then deliver it to them for development.
Third, it is necessary to monitor the progress of projects on a regular basis. After I handed over the software to a software development team, everything went wrong? If you think so, it would be a big mistake. After the task is delivered, you need to check the software development progress every other time to check the project completion. Otherwise, you may not be able to see the Software Shadow. I have learned this before. I once handed over the project to a software company in another place. I can only contact me by phone because it is too far away to check the progress of the project. Every time they call to ask, they always finish well, and then they even say that the software is already being tested. As a result, on the day the software was delivered as stipulated in the contract, they admitted that they had no time to complete my software due to too many projects and demanded extension. The final rule is that the project completed in one month has not been completed well for three months. At first, I simply don't need to pay a deposit, and I found a software company to develop the project. From this lesson, we can draw a conclusion that when selecting a project owner, it is best to ask the other party to be in the same city as you, so that you can monitor the progress of the project on a regular basis, if any problem occurs, you can discuss and solve it in time. after the project is completed, you can ask the other party to pass the software installation and debugging, and then hand over the money for delivery. In addition, when both parties sign the contract, it is necessary to clarify the project progress, such as submitting the DEMO in seven days, completing the project in half in fifteen days, and completing the project in thirty days, complete the software test in 35th days. In short, during the project, you need to regularly check and supervise the completion of the software. If you find that the contract has not been reached, You need to supervise and warn the software developers.
Finally, software outsourcing has a problem of post-maintenance. After all the software has been installed, tested, and delivered for use, will all the projects be finished? Do you have nothing to do with software developers? No. There is also a maintenance period for the software. For large software, this period is generally one year. During this period, if any software BUG is found, that is to say, the software company or software team can be asked to correct the problem again. Sometimes, I feel that new features should be added, and I can ask the software company to upgrade the program. Of course, adding new features is generally paid, so we should avoid it as much as possible. It is best to analyze all functional requirements when talking about requirements, as mentioned above, it will not be repeated. Note that the other party is generally required to provide all source code and technical documents when delivering the software. In this case, if the other party cannot maintain the software for various reasons, you can also entrust others to maintain or upgrade the software.
I have discussed some of my experiences and lessons in software outsourcing. In actual project outsourcing, different software requirements may vary, but the requirements for outsourcing are common. Therefore, as long as you can conscientiously do the above and keep thinking and summing up in practice, I believe you will be able to entrust the right people to develop a software suitable for the special requirements of the industry, to help you do a good job in daily operations and management.