You’ve spent days thinking about your new product. You know if you can pull it off, it will save your business countless hours and do good things for your bottom line for years to come.
It’s time for the next step.
You end up throwing hours trying to develop your product, way over budget and you’re not even that happy with the result. This is a common story from many businesses in Australia.
So how do they avoid ending up in this position?
The answer is a dev agency- the secret to building the right product, on the right budget, with less risk.
Dev Agencies in Australia have a clear plan that outlines your vision for what should be built and the steps required to build it. They act as a bridge between you and the final product.
It’s an answer to all your big questions like what a wildly successful project looks like, what features will be built, how long it will take, and what the cost will be.
But doing it yourself doesn’t work, that’s where dev agencies come in. They have a pool of talents with experience and expertise who will guide you through building your product.
If you’re confused about what questions will you ask a dev agency in Australia before hiring it, here are a few for your help.
It is better that you don’t make a hasty decision of hiring a dev agency partner without checking their portfolio or past works. Extended product teams with a great applications portfolio will naturally create better results for you too!
This way, you will be able to see what kind of products they have created before and whether they have the expertise to build your product or not. Also, ask them if you can walk through their portfolios to make it easier for you to judge and make the best decision for your business.
For example, if they are app dev agencies in Australia, looking at their case studies will help you to understand how they’ve approached past projects from beginning to end.
If the dev agency has a portfolio with successful projects that show off its skills along with references from past clients, then they are likely good candidates for your project.
It is essential to know where the development team will work from. There are many dev agencies in Sydney but they mainly operate from other countries. Knowing the location of your development agency partner will help you to understand the time zone, cultural differences, and legal technicalities.
If you’re an Australian company with a development agency in India, you should know about GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and how it applies to you.
Also, ask your dev partner, how they will communicate with you about the development of your product. If they already follow the remote development policy, it can be easier to communicate with them because they already have an established workflow and communication style.
Hiring individual remote developers or building an extended team are two different things. Ask your dev agency how the team will be building your product. Their main team of experts may not be working in the same country as yours.
If you already have a development team but are taking a long time behind schedule, way over budget and you’re not even that happy with the result. Building an extended team with the help of a dev agency can enable you with engineering experts to reduce the risks and unknowns of your project.
It is better if you have a daily meeting at a common time where you can discuss, know about your product development stages, and make any amendments if required.
The question may confuse you when hiring a dev agency in Australia. In-house developers are a part of your company for whom you provide assets, salary, and other benefits. They will work in the same place as yours. They are called onshore developers too.
In contrast, remote/dedicated developers are part of an agency where you discuss your project and the agency provides you with a team of experts as required by your project.
As more and more businesses are inclining towards a distributed team model, the major benefit that you gain when hiring them from an agency is cost. Popular offshore countries like India tend to offer attractive tax incentives and lower overall salary costs that reduce operating costs. Without additional cost, you can quickly scale your business by hiring remote developers.
When choosing an In-house development team, you'll be paying local salaries, which can be two or three times more than offshore teams. Plus you will also need a permanent office space and pay health benefits, and other benefits, which may increase your ops cost.
Development happens in four major steps. Here is what a dev agency follows when developing a product.
Step 1-
It is essential that the first phase should always be analyzing the actual workflow. The senior business analyst analyzes the actual workflow in your organization, which further helps agencies to draft the development roadmap. Building an MVP with basic functionalities and minimal features will help you understand your target audiences better.
Step 2-
In this step, a dev agency follows the design of the product that suits the criteria and needs of the client. It also provides the foundation to start discussing the product's feature set as the product development strategy.
Step 3-
This step is to incorporate testing and iterations into the development process with small sprints, helping them complete each part of the development effectively.
Step 4-
The final step consists of maintaining the product as required by the market so as to be in the competitor’s list.
The methodology is not only about the process a dev agency uses, it tells a lot about the company. It depends on the dev agency which methodology they are following- Agile or Waterfall.
Using waterfall methodology, companies are likely to be more linear in their development process. As this methodology is based on extensive documentation and fixed requirements and tasks.
In contrast, Agile methodology is one of the most popular development approaches because of its dynamic and fluid nature. Dev agencies in Australia today are aptly embracing this method, taking advantage of its simple & lightweight framework to enable you to scale up in the business.
It also enables a dev agency to achieve the desired results through building agile distributed teams, rapid iteration, and experimentation, allowing them to build & launch awesome products within weeks.
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It is essential to discuss what happens after the development is completed. Developing a product is just one side of the coin. Therefore, it is good to ask your dev agency partner whether they also do maintenance along with development. It is important to keep maintaining your product and updating it to be in the competition. Maintenance and support of your application ensure it works flawlessly without any glitches.
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Saving cost is one the essential factors when it comes to partnering with a dev agency in Australia. Hiring local talent is no longer the most efficient way to fast-track your business. Apart from cutting down costs, partnering with the best web dev agencies can also scale up your business. We have collected a few figures to help you understand how a dev agency can save costs.
The average annual salary of an In-house developer in Australia ranges from $110,000 to $130,000 whereas, the average salary of a remote developer salary in Australia ranges from $90,620 to $103,158 per year or $52.90 per hour.
A dev agency in Sydney has a wide range of talents and experts that your in-house development team may lack. Whereas partnering with a dev agency can lower your other overhead costs but also has cherry-picked specialists with the required skills and experience.
Projects typically have a set scope to begin. A good dev agency will try its best to uphold those requirements to prevent scope creep, which minimizes surprises for both parties. But things can happen and you may find yourself in a position where your needs evolved from what you first anticipated.
For this reason, it’s helpful to understand how the dev agency handles changes that arise after a project is underway. Knowing this upfront can prevent you from heading back to the drawing board if something pops up down the road.
For big projects that will make a real difference to your business, it’s not only a safe choice to go with a dev agency in Australia over an in-house team, but a smart one.
A software dev agency can dig deep into how your business works, tell you exactly what product you need to make the biggest impact, and then make sure your project goes off without a hitch.
Partnering with a dev agency will give you a fully-fledged project with experienced business advisors, not just the raw development power, and you have a far higher chance of seeing it completed on time and within budget.
The questions we’ve listed in this blog post are just the tip of the iceberg, but they’re essential.
It is essential to focus on questions like:
Depending on the flow of the conversation, you will come up with additional and more in-depth questions. This will give you a chance to filter the dev agency and partner with the one that best suits your needs.