Hire Dedicated Development Team in 2023: The Ultimate Guide

A dedicated development team refers to a cooperation model with a software architecture vendor, in which the client is provided with software development specialists on a long-term basis.

This cooperation model is formed based on the objectives, demands, and requirements of the customer. Dedicated development team is great for performing large, long-term projects with frequently changing requirements. It is quite flexible focusing on the scope of work and tasks, costs and resources, as well as prioritizing the development team itself. Big enterprises tend to hire dedicated development teams since they need specialists for new projects or tech tasks where they lack experience.

In other words, dedicated team model stands for hiring tech specialists from providers to do a particular job. For example, you need talents for a side project, yet you don’t want to distract the core team from their tasks. There’s no secret that the global pandemic of COVID-19 has also made its mark on the modern cooperation approaches between software architecture vendors and customers. The remote way of partnership as well as work helps to select the missing tech employee expertise anywhere in the world. Thus, the required competence can be found more easily, more quickly, and at reasonable hourly rates.

By hiring a dedicated team, you are, in a sense, employing a cohesive organism that is driven by your objectives, follows your directions as well as development vector. Needless to say, that the possibility that such specialists will quit the project halfway to its finish it eliminated.

The customer has expanded management opportunities when hiring a dedicated development team than in other models. In typical cooperation options, clients can interact with the team by tracking daily tasks and overall project progress. This enables all parties keep up with the entire workflow and adapt to the dynamic circumstances.

From this comes the key value of this model, which is an enhanced concentration. The team is focused on the one project, which increases the speed and quality of the outcome. Such challenges as the team being stretched too thin or too overworked are not your headaches. This is due to the fact, that they've set an objective based on your project and are moving gradually to its achievement.

There are two aspects to forming a dedicated team. In the first case, we are talking about a separate, full-service team that includes all the necessary employees, such as a business analyst, frontend software architect, etc. In the second case, the customer is able to hire a dedicated development team to augment the current employees and strengthen the entire environment with several external experts. Yet, its vital to remember that dedicated teams don’t usually cooperate with in-house programmers and are managed on the customer's side. When the project is over, the cooperation also comes to an end.

Dedicated development teams would not be so popular if they did not have certain advantages that can leverage business tech goals.

When you hire dedicated development team, one of the first benefits you will receive is significant savings on product development and solving other technical problems.

This form of outsourcing is included in the concept of development outsourcing, which, is considered an excellent solution to reduce development costs. And this is true because to realize the savings, you just need to compare the software developer hourly rates in the US and Europe. While a specialist in the USA will cost you $150 per hour, in Central Europe, a same-skilled developer will cost $50 (we'll talk about developer rates in different regions a little later).

When deciding to resort to the help of a dedicated development team, you can be sure that you can easily find the right specialists because you are not limited by the borders of your country. If you cannot find a specialist of the required level at home, you can always find them in an offshore country and hire them for your project.

A dedicated development team model is an extremely flexible way of cooperation with outsourcing vendors. Having hired a certain set of specialists, they temporarily come under your control, and you can manage them as you please.

In addition, you are free to expand the deduced team by hiring additional developers from the vendor if the previously agreed team is not enough to complete the tasks. All developers fully adapt to your workflow, which you are also free to change during development. With this outsourcing model, you have full control over the hired developers.

What IT specialists can you hire as members of your dedicated team? There are a bunch of specialists, from developers to UI/UX designers.

Here’s a list of talents you can hire and their responsibilities:

Frontend or client-side development is the process of converting data into the graphical interface to let users interact with the product. Such developers tend to work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Backend of the project is where developers build the business logic. It consists of a server, an application, and a database. Backend developers usually have experience in Node.js and MongoDB and SQL databases.

There are two main operating systems — iOS and Android. Developers should know different programming languages to create apps — Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android). Nowadays, mobile devices are integral part of the society life which makes services of such specialists highly demanded. Apart from this, the great solution allowing to build a cross-platform solution at reduced costs is a framework called Flutter.

Design is vital for your app success. UI/UX designers create screens and their conditions and hand over the design to developers. They tend to use Sketch and InVision. The designing part is vital for the software solution success since it determines the entire user experience as well as the delivered satisfaction rate.

Quality assurance services focus on releasing bug-free products. QA engineers perform manual and automated tests to find flaws and inform developers about them. Therefore, the final product operates smoother, correctly, and efficiently.

Outsourced DevOps specialists are responsible for identifying the right tools, set processes, and automate the code flow from development to production. This increases the performance efficiency and streamlines the project completion.

The main task of business analysts is to study the client's business in order to improve internal processes and change the course of development to a more productive one. Their tasks are to identify acute business problems and find solutions that will help eliminate them Also, the business analyst collects the customer's requirements and draws up the terms of reference for the development team, proposes a solution to the customer's problem.

Of course, it’s not a full list of IT specialists you can hire. The choice always depends on your project requirements and business goals. Among the additional specialists that can be useful in various software development cases are:

• Project Manager. Their main responsibility in dedicated team is to supervise the development process and provide reports on the work done. An extremely useful specialist if you do not have the good technical knowledge to control development on your own.
• Data Scientists. They Design data modeling processes to create algorithms and predictive models and perform custom analysis.
• Solutions Architect. This specialist is responsible for evaluating the existing technical solutions of the business, designing and developing new technological solutions, and integrating them into work processes.

There are several points to consider when you hire dedicated team. You need to pay attention to their location because it affects the price. Also, it’s better to consider the platform you can use to find the required specialists.

There are several popular destinations to hire dedicated teams:

• North America
• South America
• Western Europe
• Central Europe
• Asia and India
• Australia

However, the price and qualification depend on the region. For example, companies from North America charge the highest rates. On the contrary, Asian software development companies have the lowest rates, but their customer service is often questionable.

Here’s a brief overview of dedicated development team’s rates by members for various regions:

There are a bunch of platforms where you can find a dedicated team.

The IT services outsourcing market size is expected to reach $531 billion by 2022. This market growth is associated with the consequences of the pandemic when businesses need to continue to provide their processes with new software products, and they turn to outsource companies for their development. And as a result, in addition to rapid growth, this market can boast of colossal profitability, as analysts claim that the industry will earn $351 billion by the end of 2021.

There are several examples of companies that have cooperated with dedicated development teams and outsourced their tasks to outsource vendor:

• Google. This giant outsources parts of its projects like IT management and backend development to reduce expenses.
• Slack has outsourced the development of their mobile app and marketing website. A dedicated team created the project’s MVP.
• Expensify cooperated with an outsourcing company to develop a backend part of the project.
• Alibaba. This Chinese public commerce giant has outsourced the design of its website as well as some of the tasks associated with the development of the Alibaba platform.
• WhatsApp. The development of the iOS version of the popular messenger was completely outsourced to a dedicated development team.
• GitHub. The largest web service for hosting IT projects has put a significant portion of the backend website development in the hands of the dedicated development team.

Hiring an experienced dedicated team requires some preparation. Below you can find tips that can make the hiring process more comfortable and profitable.

The initial stage from which the whole process begins is the search and selection of a worthy vendor who provides the services of a dedicated development team. You should go through several steps that will allow you to choose the right partner for your technical tasks.

Step 1. Do the Market Research

Market research is one of the main stages of finding a software company for product development. We advise you to start your search from specialized sites such as Clutch, GoodFirms, IT Firms, which are aggregators of information about development vendors from all over the world. You need to check the companies that have the required expertise. Also, it’s good to study how many years they’re in business as the longer they are in the market, the higher the chances that the vendor is experienced and expert in software development.

Another vital factor to consider is the company’s growth. In most cases, good service providers tend to scale their business. As a result, the number of employees is growing. You can look at the number of branches of the company, in which countries they are located and the approximate number of employees of the company. This information is often also available on specialized sites for finding IT partners.

Step 2. Study the Company’s Reviews

On sites such as Clutch, GoodFirms, IT Firms, you can always find a section with reviews of other clients on the services of companies, and they should be carefully studied to avoid mistakes. You should understand how the cooperation between clients and the IT vendor went, what difficulties arose during product development (if any) and what general impressions the cooperation brought. This will give you a complete picture of what an IT partner is and whether it is worth contacting for help.

Review platforms tend to verify customers’ feedback, so you can be sure that all the comments are valid.

Step 3. Look Through the Previous Projects

Every reliable vendor has a portfolio with previous works. You can look through the released tech products on the company’s website. By the way, you’re welcome to study Cleveroad’s portfolio.

Portfolio research is an extremely important process as it will help you understand what the company is doing and whether it has the necessary expertise to complete your task. After all, it would be bizarre to contact a vendor to develop a medical CRM system if before that company was engaged in developing travel applications.

How to protect your project idea? It’s better to sign an NDA agreement before discussing the project.

NDA agreement covers such aspects of the development process as the procedure of data collection, transfer, access, and more. This agreement signed by the vendor obliges him to keep secret not only technical developments but also the customer's ideas, industry field and other information that can harm if it falls into the wrong hands.

Also, software development companies should follow the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if they are developing a product that will somehow use the personal data of EU residents. In addition, do not forget that the company of your choice must be fully ISO/IEC 27001. This establishes the requirements for an information security management system to demonstrate the organization's ability to protect its information resources. This compliance guarantees that the business data you transfer to the vendor for software development will be protected.

Having a dedicated development team for hire, you have to pay attention to the company’s transparency. You can manage the team yourself or hire a project manager. In both cases, you need to use project management tools.

Management transparency is an important factor of interaction with the dedicated team, and project management systems help to ensure it. In our humble opinion, there are three great tools that help bring team and project management to the next level:

• Jira. A platform for managing projects, tasks and tracking bugs. The platform is intended primarily for developers and agile projects. Jira is available as a web and desktop app. The Jira platform is a flexible tool in which companies can adapt and change the functional appearance of the service to their needs. The Jira administrator can define issues with unique constituent elements, bind a set of statuses, and define access rights for each project.
• Trello. It is one of the most popular online project management systems and is in great demand among small companies and startups. It allows you to effectively organize work according to the Japanese methodology of kanban boards.
• Kantree. It is a combination of database and project management software. It replaces spreadsheets and emails with an easy-to-use, collaborative, and extremely flexible platform to improve team engagement and efficiency.

The interview is a critical stage in which you must deeply evaluate the skills of the developers. Therefore, the interview process includes various communication channels that are involved in different stages of communication. Therefore, we will consider several of the most basic interviewing methods so that you can choose the most suitable for you.

The first meeting is all about sharing your expectations, business goals, and project requirements. Also, you can ask about the developers’ CVs, skill level, and more.

During the phone call, you need to arrange a time for a video interview to test the candidates’ skill level. You can send some practical tasks to solve.

The first phone call takes 20-30 minutes. This time is enough to draw up the first impression of the candidate.

During this interview, you need to test the candidates’ hard and soft skills.

Hard skills are vital for the developers’ job. They include the demanded knowledge and experience to create tech products. It’s common to list these skills in the job description.

It’s impossible to test the developers’ hard skills without a technical background. So, you need to cooperate with a tech consultant knowing what does a CTO do.

There are files with interview questions for developers with diverse expertise:

• Hard skills of Node.js programmers
• Hard skills of JavaScript programmers
• Angular programmers
• Frontend programmers
• Hire Android developer
• iOS developers
• Flutter programmers

To cooperate with the team effectively, the candidate should have good soft skills.

There’s a PDF file with interview questions to ask a dedicated development team for hire.

You need to check the following soft skills:

• Communication skills
• Creativity
• Conflict management
• Work in a team
• Adaptability
• Dedication

The last step is signing a contract to start the development process.

A valid contract should contain the following data: full name of the services, price, payment, and delivery procedure. You also need to sign an NDA agreement (if you haven’t yet) to protect your project idea. Even though the development process is unpredictable and various unforeseen circumstances can shift the agreed time frame, you should not worry about it. The contract can be renewed at any time if necessary.

Cleveroad is a software development company providing dedicated team services for more than 10 years for companies of various industries and sizes. We have an extensive staff of specialists who are ready to integrate your company into your work processes and provide their experience in the development and design of software for business.

There are several reasons to cooperate with Cleveroad:

• Agile-oriented team of more than 100 highly qualified specialists to choose from: Android and IOS developers, UI/UX designers, DevOps specialists, business analysts, solution architects, and more
• Strong technical expertise across 10 industries
• On-demand teams scaling
• Non-disclosure agreement on request
• Full management control
• No recruiting, administrative, and training expenses
• Flexible and adaptive way of communication that meets your requirements