How to choose a development team

If you're in the process of choosing a software development team, of course we'd like you to pick us — but we think it's worthwhile sharing some general advice about the process rather than just reeling off a list of everything that makes our team special. Bear in mind that many of our clients have worked with other development teams too, which means we've heard our fair share of horror stories.

Show me the process — developing software is about much more than just putting programmers in a room with a generous supply of coffee and pizza. "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature," write software consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in Peopleware. If a firm doesn't have a process it can show you, it's guaranteed to be chaos; and if they just say "we don't have a process, we're agile" then be very careful about dealing with them.

Who are the testers? — not only do you need to look for evidence of an actual planned-out process, you also need to look for evidence of a tester or two in the team's ranks as well. If you look around the employees of the company you're thinking of dealing with and you can't spot the person that's going to be checking everything for bugs then... it's probably you.

Is that a fixed estimate? — moving on to money matters, if you're agreeing a day rate for development services with a prospective partner, don't pay too much attention to any "total estimate" they offer you. Once you get into the details, you'll soon find yourself asking for tweaks and discovering all sorts of additional complexity, which means the original figure will probably soon go out of the window. Be sure of how much you're likely to be paying and what you're going to get back in return.

Even when it is a fixed price, is the cheapest quote the best value for money? — as with plumbers and broadband suppliers, it can be tempting to simply shop around for the best price, but remember that not all programmers are created equal. Coders can range from the very, very good to the very, very bad — a lot more so than in most other professions — and paying 50 percent more for a really good team is going to save you a lot more money in the long run. In our view it's worth paying extra for a guarantee of getting it right first time.

Keep those four points in mind during the decision-making process and you should avoid some of the more common pitfalls when it comes to picking a firm to work with. And if you want a development team that ticks all of the right boxes, you know where to find us.