In my career I have work on both sides of the app development world. I have earned battle scars having been in the trenches trying to guide inexperienced product managers with unrealistic, “but in Excel I can just copy and paste”, expectations. As well as interviewed and hired consultants to develop key features of a company’s product.     

So, for you I have pulled together a list of five, yes five ways you can differentiate between the “not so good” app development companies and the “really great, I love them” app development companies.

1. They expect a well-defined project definition (or will work with you to create one).
2. They aren’t a “shell company” for very cheap and inexperienced offshore contractors.
3. They gladly provide a list of at least five references from previous projects, within the last two years that are somewhat similar to your project.
4. They have a reasonable hourly bill rate.
5. They don’t cut corners (aka testing and project management)

Let’s dig a bit deeper on these.
 

Well-defined Project

The key to all successful custom app development projects is setting the expectation of what you want delivered, how you want it delivered, when you want it delivered, and how much it will cost to deliver it. Projects that are ill-defined usually fail not because the technical team cannot write software, but usually because the project’s scope is not well defined. Too often product owners feel they are not technical enough to define the technical aspects of a project, and that maybe true, but no one should never be at the mercy of the technical team. If you don’t have a well-defined project, a great app development team will help you create one, they understand its importance to the success of the final product.
 

Are you for REAL?

​Every day I get calls from very inexpensive technical sales people attempting to sell me software development resources that are one-fourth the price of the experienced and well-trained developers I have sitting right out my office door. 
business buildingHowever, I have worked for firms that have used those ridiculously cheap offshore contractors and the results were nearly comical. More time was spent fixing the problems than producing the desired features. Even with the ability to have two or three additional resources for the price of one, in the end results did not increase the ROI. Believe it or not, there is a market out there for people who create shell companies with sales and marketing teams and then staff the project with inexperienced offshore temporary contractors. Caveat emptor! An easy way to make sure you don’t get duped is to ask for resumes with company email addresses and number of years the employee has worked with the company. Usually these companies do not want to provide (or have to create) company email addresses for temporary resources, and will choose to not bother with your request. LinkedIn is also a great tool for cross checking this kind of information.
 

Get References People!

A great way to get an idea of the capabilities of a technical consulting team is to review their past performance. Ask for a list of past clients and projects which were similar in nature to yours. If the technology is new or it’s their first project of the kind, that’s okay as long as you know they have a history of success. The best firms (and usually the more expensive) have done this before and have developed a set of best practices or processes. Ask them what their best practices or processes are to see what they have learned from these past projects. 
 

What's it Gonna Cost Me?

When looking at the overall cost to develop custom software there is a tendency to want to reduce the cost of the project by cutting or eliminating project management and testing. Imagine if the operating system on your computer wasn’t tested before you started working on it. You likely would have grown frustrated very quickly with all the bugs and switched to one that had been thoroughly tested. The same goes for your project, typically software testing should consist of 20-40% of the overall project effort. Project management is also another overhead costs that is typically scrapped in the hopes that the project cost can be reduced, but when this is cut it will likely result missed features and cost overruns. There are years of experience and thousands of painful lessons that have contributed to why both of these efforts are part of a well-defined software development practice.    
 

Short-cuts Stink in App Development

When looking at the overall cost to develop custom software there is a tendency to want to reduce the cost of the project by cutting or eliminating project management and testing. Imagine if the operating system on your computer wasn’t tested before you started working on it. You likely would have grown frustrated very quickly with all the bugs and switched to one that had been thoroughly tested. The same goes for your project, typically software testing should consist of 20-40% of the overall project effort. Project management is also another overhead costs that is typically scrapped in the hopes that the project cost can be reduced, but when this is cut it will likely result missed features and cost overruns. There are years of experience and thousands of painful lessons that have contributed to why both of these efforts are part of a well-defined software development practice.
 

Simple But Useful

Designing and developing world-class applications is a complicated matter and when you hire someone to develop it for you it’s often nearly impossible to know who exactly you are hiring and what the outcome of your project will be, however if you utilize these tips you will have a much better rate of success delivering successful projects to your company.