Rather than contracting individual personnel, wouldn’t it be smarter and more cost effective to contract a small development team. I’m not talking about outsourcing entire projects or development teams. I am talking about a small team consisting of something like: one ba, one coder and one tester that are contracted in together to do a single application, project or component. When they are done, or their contract expires, you get get rid of them all. They are a team outside the bounds of your organisation.
The advantage over hiring the three individually is that they will already have a great working dynamic. If they didn’t, they would not be in a team outside of your organisation. They will be self managing and they should have evolved their own internal communication processes to keep each other informed on progress. They would also potentially be able to work around the political issues that often exist between the overarching teams surrounding each software development discipline.
We all know the benefits of a well drilled team working cohesively towards a shared goal. It can be difficult to get a team working together quickly to achieve these benefits. Every new project brings new members and different hurdles. With a prebuilt team you can shift the costs of the team building phase outside of your organisation.
I would like to know if anyone has tried such a setup and whether or not it succeeded or if it failed.
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Ryan Boucher is a Software Inquisitor and is passionate about it. You can find a whole raft of articles and anecdotes about software testing and other topics he gets excited about. |
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3 Responses to “Contractable Development Teams”
Why would it be more cost effective to hire a pre-built team? As opposed to hiring individual contractors.
Surely the cost per capita would be higher for the team, as they would be able to argue that they have an es
already established rapport, effective communication and teamwork skills, etc etc.
And did you know that if you write a really really long sentence in this comments box then it does not wrap the text correctly? I can’t see this sentence…
Its a defect I say! Report it at once! Who tested this comments box!?
While they will probably cost more in literal dollars, for the reasons you mention above. The benefits that they provide help to ensure an overall quality product. With most defects being introduced during the development phase of a project maximising quality in your initial development will cost less than producing crap quickly and fixing it up later.