Significant Considerations for Choosing a Software Development Partner

Successful businesses leverage channel partnership to collaborate on challenging projects and implement best practices to achieve business growth. Today enterprises rely increasingly on channel partnerships, joint ventures, and open business models to focus on their core competencies without any hassle. Even Fortune 1000 companies are utilizing outsourcing and collaboration to achieve faster time to market, increase business agility, get quality talent to create innovative solutions. However, to access the said benefits, first, you must select the right partner from a diverse set of providers that vary by size, capability, geography, and vertical market.

• Assess Specialization and Size – While performing your software company partnership research, you might come across many companies claiming to offer the almost the same services. To decide, whether they are right for your business mix, you must conduct thorough due diligence about the specialization contended by the potential partner, for their team size & core strength. It would be prudent to check the specific capabilities of the potential partner through case studies, white papers, and even cross-checking them by considering their previous engagements.
• Domain Knowledge Expertise and Applied Methodology – Your potential partner must possess the required maturity for the said expertise in product development with a thorough understanding of product lifecycle management practice;

1. The partner must offer a high degree of collaboration and transparency between you and the engaged project team through participation in the active iteration planning and review sessions
2. The leadership team in the partner company must maintain the specialized skills in conceptualization, design, documentation, and modernization for the said product
3. The development team must be competent with effective management of multiple release cycles. The software application development partner must have a hands-on understanding of Agile methods to ensure maximum Return On Investment (ROI)
4. Also, the developers must possess the capability to quickly adapt to future product release requirements while meeting the end user needs

• Cost Consideration – One of the crucial aspects, it must be discussed openly before signing-on any software development partnership. It helps avoid any confusion in the future. A feasible practice­ would be to get a holistic quote beforehand about the incurred total cost over the course of the project, instead of hourly rates. It also includes consideration of scalability expenses for the future that you may bear while developing a product. During this phase, you must spend time on understanding if there are any hidden cost or any other expenses you are missing out which you might end up paying at a later stage which could be beyond expectation.

Choosing the right software development partner, be it for a small project or a long-term relationship, won’t be easy. Your software product development partner must have rich expertise and experience in the product development lifecycle to create applications that are critical to your business needs. Listed above are some of the core steps for choosing a software partnership that will help you streamline the selection process by putting the essential elements in place, and helping you make the right choice.

At Rishabh Software, we have extensive experience in partnering and helping companies from around the globe. Catch the recap of our recent webinar on “Growing with Partnership” to learn and fine-tune your considerations for choosing software partner.