Selecting an Agile Development Team

Selecting an agile development team is an important decision for any business. After all, the decision to transform your company doesn’t come lightly. Moving into the new era of solving business challenges with software solutions is a critical turning point in your company’s future.

If you’ve come to the conclusion that you need to outsource an expert agile development team, it’s likely because your internal team lacks development, QA, staging, UAT, or other environments, or you need a higher quality rapid development. It makes more business sense to invest in an expert agile development team than go through the capital expenditures required to obtain the resources to build the software solution internally.

However, this investment must be made carefully. Trust your company only to experts in agile software development, and those that work within guided principles and proven processes, like Third Wave. Here are some important things to consider when selecting an agile development team.

1. Requirements

When you are looking for an agile software development team, it’s not realistic to have all of your requirements up front. Why, you might ask? Things change. Your business goals might shift, your industry standards and requirements might change, technology might change…the list goes on. Quality software gets built in the agile process, which allows for many different modifications and rapid iteration. Our end results is always a first-class product that meets our clients’ needs.

2. Quality

Quality is subjective based on what standards of which are applied. Focus on how your potential agile development team will adhere to best practices and coding standards, and how they adjust and move quickly through the agile development process to get the high quality end product. Poor code quality can be devastating to the overall long term cost of a project by introducing many bugs, resulting in high maintenance costs and also making it difficult to modify, extend or update. On the other side, spending too much time on “perfect code” can slow a project down, and be wasted time – and money- if the project even slightly changes in scope. It’s good measure to define your agile development team’s standards, protocol and quality measures from the beginning, so you understand what product will be delivered in the end. Third Wave’s cloud based continuous development process allows our clients to see every step of our work and provide constant feedback on the next focus. This is how we promise rapid development and top quality products.

3. Testing

The cost of catching a bug before it goes to production is significantly less than fixing it later. This is probably the least considered factor in the true value of software. So, how much and what type of testing is included in your project? Will test driven development, automation, manual and regression testing be performed to ensure high quality? Drill down the details on the agile software development team’s testing from the get go. Third Wave’s process has testing down to a science.

4. Scalability and Tolerance

Most custom software is rarely performance tested before release, leaving the possibility of crashing an unknown time bomb. A system can also be over engineered to scale to millions without the real possibility of this occurring. This can add to the length of the project and cost of the overall system. When selecting your agile development team, get a clear picture of how the process accounts for scalability and tolerance. Our principal developers assigned to each agile development project are responsible for ensuring that these high level system considerations fit each client’s current and future needs.

5. Security

In today’s world of widespread hacking and frequent compromises, security can’t be an afterthought. In the process of selecting an agile development team, ask if they include a security review or testing. What vulnerabilities or risk may be introduced? This step is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Investment in the security of your software solution should be a top priority. Our collaborative development process has many checks and balances, with many developers’ and principal developers’ eyes on a project to promise the highest level of security.

6. Architecture

Just like building a custom home, there is subjectivity involved in software architecture. What one development team might think is just right, another development team might think is overdone. An over engineered solution can increase maintenance, while a poorly architected system can result in severe limitations to the software capabilities, openness and even increase development costs if multiple teams need to be able to work on it simultaneously. Many times, you don’t realize the true cost until you go to extend the software. Third Wave builds software to meet each client’s unique needs and preferences. It won’t be overdone, or underdone, but it will be just right.

When selecting an agile development team, take all of these factors into account, especially when considering the length and cost of the project. You can see that a first-class software solution balances many factors, and if the cost seems too low, or too high, you can likely figure out why by going through this list. The Third Wave agile software process addresses these and other issues by taking a different approach. Learn more about how we work ?