Software company with
in-house development needs
5 to 20 Developers

The client is a medium-sized communication and IT company, working in Germany for almost 50 years. It is a highly innovative service provider working with regionally and globally successful brands, from small businesses to internationally active corporations.

The client needed support in developing a new B2B portal. Initially, a team of 20 developers worked on the project in Germany. However, it became apparent that the development was cumbersome and time-consuming while the costs exceeded acceptable levels. Therefore, the client contacted Outsourcing4work with the following requirements:

• Five very experienced Indian back-end developers with extensive knowledge and experience in AngularJS and TypeScript were to replace the previous back-end team.
• In addition to excellent programming skills, teamwork and motivation, they needed to be experienced with Agile software development and Scrum.
• They also needed to have the highest flexibility in dealing with short-term questions and problems.
• The costs needed to be significantly lesser than those of the German developers.
• Three developers were to be up and running within two weeks, with two more to follow, two weeks later.
• Smooth cooperation between the Indian developers and the customer had to be guaranteed at all times.

To meet the customer’s requirements, Outsourcing4work chose a holistic approach, outlined below:

• The coordination was carried out by an experienced IT specialist based in Germany, experienced in Indian culture and mentality with precise knowledge of the IT market in India. He works directly at the customer’s site whenever necessary or useful. He also acts as a mediator and catches possible differences in mentality between the client in Germany and offshore developers in India.
• Outsourcing4work’s German coordinator immediately started working on the project. During the first month, he worked exclusively at the customer’s site. From the second month onwards, on-site work was reduced to two days per week. In the meantime, on-site days were arranged as required while normal coordination was done remotely at Outsourcing4work.
• The client received comprehensive support from the Outsourcing4work coordinator, which helped in searching for and presenting suitable developers, executing interviews, developing test tasks, defining work processes, selecting the best candidates and other administrative tasks.
• In cooperation with its Indian partners, Outsourcing4work proposed several highly qualified development teams to the client, who shortlisted a few, which were then evaluated in in-depth interviews. After completing test tasks, the final development team in India was assembled for the client.
• During the training phase, the Outsourcing4work coordinator instructed the development team and explained the work processes.
• To organise and process development tasks, the team uses JIRA software as a central tool for project management and collaboration while Bitbucket is used for versioning. Both are ideally suited to support agile Scrum projects in distributed teams.
• A 15-minute meeting (daily scrum) is held every day in which the team discusses pending and completed tasks as well as any problems that have arisen.
• At day-end, each developer sends a status email to the Outsourcing4work coordinator and the client informing them about the current status. Generated code is checked into Bitbucket. The status and content of the corresponding tasks are updated on the JIRA board.
• The developers’ working hours are documented via a cloud-based time recording software viewable by the customer. This takes a screenshot of each developer’s screen every three minutes and ensures that the work done is invoiced to the minute.

The working process is structured as follows:

• The customer enters tasks in the JIRA backlog.
• The Outsourcing4work coordinator translates the tasks into English and forwards them via JIRA board to the Indian team.
• The Indian team leader discusses the tasks with the developers. They enter a time estimate and their approach for each task on the JIRA board.
• The client checks the time estimates and releases them. If his expectations and the time estimates differ, the corresponding tasks are discussed in a meeting and an agreement on the required processing time is reached.
• The Outsourcing4work coordinator collects the released tasks in a task package called Sprint in Scrum Projects and starts it at the scheduled time.
• The developers get the respective tasks from JIRA ToDo and hand them over to the Indian team leader for review after they have been completely processed.
• After successful review, the Indian team leader hands over the tasks via JIRA to the Outsourcing4work coordinator.
• After another successful review, the Outsourcing4work coordinator also forwards the completed tasks to the client via JIRA.

Reviews include the following elements:

• Functions: In the function review the created code’s entire functionality is tested.
• Code: In the code review, compliance with the code guidelines specified by the client is checked. Using test cases and appropriate software, Outsourcing4work ensures the customer’s coding specifications are adhered to throughout the development process.