Choosing the right outsourcing strategy: company or freelancer?

When you are looking for a software developer, the first question you have to answer is: “Who's the best choice: an outsourcing company or a freelancer?”. Outsourcing itself has one major advantage – it's cheap. Clients who have little experience on the outsourcing market tend to employ the services of freelancers because they offer lower prices. However, these clients are often left disappointed. So what should an outsourcer bear in mind when deciding on the right outsourcing provider?

Project management

Coordinating the work of one freelancer is easy enough, but when dealing with two or more, synchronising work, monitoring separate tasks and combining results becomes complicated and time-consuming. In contrast to this, EDISON Software Development Centre provides a project manager for each development team who is in charge of coordinating development work in a professional manner, defining and meeting deadlines, budgeting, and other important project tasks. This guarantees our clients a quality end result.

EDISON has an established working process, which includes regular software releases and updates for clients to check and review. This approach aims of clarify requirements to further improvement the quality of any given product. If the alpha version of a software product is not frequently checked then the end result may not live up to expectations. This is often the case when clients work with freelancers. The EDISON approach means that with each alpha version release the client has the opportunity to alter the direction in which the development is going, thus greatly increasing the chances of achieving precisely what is needed.

Full cycle software development services

Freelancers usually offer one type of services, such as software or web-development. They often lack the appropriate skills to work as a business or systems analyst and so are unable to gather the necessary requirements from the client and create a proper project specification. Clarifying additional requirements is an essential stage for projects that imply intensive teamwork for one or two months. If a freelancer does not provide a proper project specification then those working on the software development will not gain a full understanding of the client's needs and this will lead to a great deal of time being wasted on redesigning the product. EDISON provides requirement-specification services and can develop a technical design specification if you do not already have one.

As a rule, freelancers do not possess adequate software-testing skills. Furthermore, if just one person is responsible for developing, testing and providing documentation for a particular software product then the end result is bound to suffer. EDISON provides software-testing services by employing skilled testers who specialise in this very type of service.

If you wish to set up your own IT infrastructure or remote server, you will need to hire an independent systems administrator due to the fact that most freelance software developers have very little knowledge in this field. EDISON provides several hours of systems-administration services from a qualified systems administrator.

Unlike freelancers, EDISON provides a wide range of IT-services, which clients can benefit from.