How to Hire a Dedicated Development Team: Everything You Need to Know in 2023

Are you getting ready to hire dedicated development team? Or are you looking for mobile programmers to expand your existing IT department?

Outsourcing software development can help you in any of these objectives. Software outsourcing has now become the new normal with over 50% of US companies choosing this option.

At the same time, outsourcing to a dedicated development team provides flexibility, saves costs by 50-60%, and includes wise project management.

Thus, we have created an in-depth guide on how to hire a team of developers, make wise decisions, and get more from the process. The guide includes:

• What a dedicated development team model is and what its main principles are
• Main benefits that lead companies to hire dedicated development teams
• Step-by-step process to hire a dedicated outsourced team or any other team-set you may need
• Comparison of a dedicated team model vs. in house team
• Main challenges of working with a remote dedicated software development team
• Hot tips on how to overcome pitfalls and minimize risks
• Key questions to ask during the IT vendor pre-screening process

Let’s dive into the article and learn how to hire a development team that will fit your needs perfectly.

What is the Dedicated Team Model?

“Do what you do best and outsource the rest!”
— Peter Drucker

The dedicated development team model, mostly used in software development, entails long-term cooperation between a client and an IT service provider (dedicated developers) working exclusively on the client’s project. Alternatively, this dedicated software development team can act as a separate, remote IT department.

Signs That You Need to Hire a Dedicated Development Team

The client ultimately receives the demanded IT expertise and software development services. Specialists for the project are selected based on their experience and skills to match the company’s exact needs. This dedicated team can resemble an in-house team that become part of the in-house development process. At the same time, clients have full control over the software development process.

When you hire a dedicated development team offshore, in some instances, it can save up to 50-70% on the development budget. Capital Counselor supports this statement that the main reason (70%) for outsourcing is cost reduction.

Benefits of Hiring a Dedicated Development Team

The Dedicated Development Team Model is the best solution for mid-sized businesses and enterprise clients, and in some cases for companies of a smaller size. Generally, this cooperation model is the best fit for:

1. Companies that want to cut costs on IT operations
2. Companies that need to strengthen their own teams with new talents
3. Startups that want to set up a dedicated team quickly
4. Development of complex projects that need the use of various technologies and integration with multiple third-party services
5. Projects that require hard-to-find talents
6. Projects with strict requirements that may become more difficult over time
7. Projects that only take a few months or years of development and hiring developers inside the company is too much trouble
8. Those who want to share or have complete control over the project implementation

Usually, when you hire a team of dedicated developers it can be comprised of specialists performing the following roles:

• Software Developers are the main driving force of your software dedicated team. They are usually front-end, back-end developers, and full-stack developers. For example, if you decide to build a mobile app, you will need to find iOS and Android experts.

• QA Engineers are responsible for product testing and its final quality. By checking the product against the initial requirements, they hunt down all the bugs to make sure that they are fixed before the project launch.

• The Project Manager is the main coordinator of your project and the point of contact between you and the dev team you hire.

• The Business Analyst is a team member who helps with analyzing your business requirements, prioritizing features, understanding objectives, and transforming them into functional specifications. The result of this work is a product backlog that consists of all the features and technical elements of the project and serves as a guide for the whole dedicated team.

• UX/UI Designers – these specialists can work together with the business analyst and create the user experience (UX). Based on well-defined UX, designers then create the visual part (user interface) of the solution. UX/UI designers are responsible for making a product visually attractive and user-friendly at the same time.

Dedicated Team Composition

Other crucial roles within the dedicated development team depend on the project’s specifics may include more professionals, namely:

• Software Architects relate to the architecture for digital products, which will be able to withstand high loads, and offer a high level of scalability for future improvements. This is a necessary role for projects of all sizes. This is why, when you hire a development team, it might be a good idea to add this specialist to your talent stack.

• Data Scientists relate to professionals who know how to work with big masses of data and organize it for predictions and analytics.

• DevOps Engineers are responsible for the smooth operation of the software development process (helping with tools and coding environment) and automation of code delivery from development to the production environment.

• Tech Leads are usually the most professional and skilled team members, who also manage the development process for making technical decisions.

• Team Leads are within a team of technical engineers but with more of a management responsibility.

As well, software development companies can provide staff augmentation services as you need them.

Benefits of Hiring a Dedicated Development Team

The advantages of hiring a team of dedicated developers are impressive.

Business owners can easily access a whole bunch of specialists and roles that are necessary to augment their IT department or project and save money while avoiding the risks associated with what freelance web developers for hire can offer.

1. Dedicated Team Save Costs & Time

Hiring local specialists in-house is far more expensive than sourcing specialists offshore. For starters, there is no need to rent extra office space, buy equipment, pay taxes and other related expenditures for every employee.

Another main benefit of hiring a dedicated development team lies in lower hourly rates for engineers from other regions. For instance, in Eastern Europe (Ukraine) you can hire a dedicated team of engineers for less money than in the US or Europe.

The research conducted by Daxx states that the average rate of Ukraine-based developers is around $40, compared with $130 in the USA for the same level of expertise.

2. Access to the Global Market of IT Talents

With the decision to hire a dedicated development team offshore, you are no longer limited to the local market and the competition for talent.

This way, you can find top experts, developers with 15+ years of expertise, and professionals with a niche specialization like AI & ML, Blockchain, Data Science, etc.

3. Higher Flexibility

Once you hire a dedicated development team, you will have full control over the process. In terms of flexibility, this means that you can decide on the number of engineers you may need, deadlines, tools used, and more. It is possible to change the workflow and project scope during the process easily.

On the other hand, if you do not want to spend your time on management activities, it is possible to delegate these responsibilities to a project manager who will take the lead and report on progress regularly.

As well, if your project is limited on time, after it comes to an end you won’t need to worry about laying off the team or struggling to find tasks for them within your company.

All in all, an offshore dedicated development team is a more cost-efficient alternative to having in-house developers.

In House Team vs. Dedicated Team

Where Can You Hire a Dedicated Team?

When you first decide to hire a dedicated development team, you may feel puzzled about where to find capable developers.

One of the best ways to start a hiring process and find software developers is to ask for a recommendation from friends and acquaintances who have already digitized their business. Word of mouth works well when you need to find reliable partners.

Still, this approach does not always work when you need to hire a dedicated developers team. This is why, in some cases, you should utilize some other approaches to find the extended software team based on your needs.

1. Surf the Internet

A Google search is also an effective tool to use when you decide to hire a software development team.

Articles and blog posts by a company showing up at the top of your search results are often a positive sign. The use of good SEO practices and investment in this area indicates that a company values its reputation, works actively on its growth, and pays attention to bettering its performance.

2. Online Directories & Platforms

Clutch, ITFirms, and Software World are valuable sources of information about software developers for hire. These directories provide listings of dedicated software developers, and describe their specializations and provided services.

The use of online directories can save you a lot of time, as you can compare hourly rates and lists of provided services, and read customer reviews of different vendors.

It is possible to spend countless days trying to hire a development team that will be able to meet all your requirements. We decided to help you with the task and thus created the following article.

Listing to Hire a Development Team

3. Contact Dev Teams on Social Media or on LinkedIn

Another effective variant for finding dedicated software developers is to check social media. Business-related social networks, like LinkedIn and Facebook, are good options. LinkedIn has many related forums and thematic groups to help you find developers. You can create a post with a project description and receive lots of replies.

4. Attend IT Conferences, Meetups, or Hackathons

Lastly, many talented and top-graded developers attend meetups and international IT conferences, like WebSummit. You can hire dev teams there who strive for self-education and professional growth.

These IT hubs can educate you on the right way to proceed with your project or task resolution while allowing you to make new friends among the community, including the CTOs and CEOs of IT firms.

Regions for Hiring a Development Team

Generally, there are five main regions to hire dedicated developers, namely:

• North America (Canada, USA) + Australia
• South America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile)
• Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Netherlands)
• Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus)
• Asia (India, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh)

Below, you can check out the rates for different IT specialists worldwide to make your hiring decisions wiser.

How Do You Hire a Dedicated Development Team?

In this section, we describe how to hire a team of developers and not miscalculate.

The process of hiring an outsourced team usually consists of five steps: creating a list of requirements, investigating companies’ websites, studying portfolios, collecting information about the provided security and quality of services, and, the most important, to search for a partner rather than just developers.

Let’s review each step in greater detail!

Process to Hire a Dedicated Development Team

1. Prepare Your Requirements

Do you know what expertise your current software dedicated team lacks?

Unless you know the answer to this question, you can’t really proceed with your project. Before you hire a web development team or other specialists, you need to have the following information on hand to evaluate the teams further:

• Project outline – your goals, business and tech requirements, the budget you are ready to spend, number of specialists you need, and so on.
• Evaluation scorecard - select metrics and criteria, and decide on the points you need to look at when hiring software developers.

Pro advice: A good idea is to create an RFP. A Request for Proposal is a document that lists all of the major details about your project, your specific needs, as well as a set of questions for which the potential IT firms should provide answers. Then, it is much easier to compare the teams and select the best one.

Request for Proposal Example

2. Study the Company's Website

The next step in hiring a development team should be a close investigation of the company’s website. Here are a few points you need to pay attention to:

• Read their blog and check out the provided services to make sure they meet your demands.
• Check the information for relevant experience, company size, and years on the market.
• Learn about the number of developers the company has and how the development process is managed, especially if you need further project scalability.
• Check whether the company can offer extra services you may need like business support, copywriting, marketing analysis etc.

3. Study the Portfolio

Closely study the company’s portfolio to make sure they have completed projects in your domain.

For example, MLSDev has significant experience in creating healthcare software, eCommerce, and on-demand projects, which allows us to deliver great results and apply the best development practices.

Our team helped to scale the Gopuff, on-demand service that delivers daily essentials in 650+ U.S. cities in just minutes!

Gopuff: On-Demand Delivery Solution in the USA

4. Get Information about Service Quality & Security

When you hire a dedicated team, they become an integral part of your business. This is why it is crucial to know how the company handles data and server security. Make sure that the company has a well-established process for software coding, testing, and protection of these operations.

Ask for details, namely:

• Coding standards and code review practices
• Code refactoring
• Version control of the technologies
• Server administration capabilities and security practices
• Processes of keeping project documentations and vulnerable data
• Security of information inside the company (e.g. set permissions, regular password changes, use of secure services, etc.)

Discover how the company stores and tracks project documentation and how the information is exchanged inside the company. For example, whether it is located in securely hosted services like Confluence, Google Drive, and so on.

5. Look for a Tech Partner, not just a Developer

Hire a development team with a greater idea in mind!

Consider the team, not just as a vendor, but as a tech partner that supports your business. This partner should add value to your project and be able to:

• Back you up
• Help with matching your goals with technological implementation
• Challenge you with lots of questions that lead to better results
• Offer you extra ideas and recommendations

MLSDev, a software outsourcing company, acts as a partner and helps to grow and expand the business of our clients through innovations and modern technologies. The image below illustrates some of the references from our clients.

Feedback from Clients about MLSDev

Working with a Dedicated Development Team: How to Overcome the Potential Challenges

Cooperation based on the dedicated team model, like any other IT outsourcing partnership, is associated with risks and challenges that can undermine the success of your project.

By knowing what difficulties you might face in advance, you will be able to tackle them before they arise.

1. Budget Increase

Sometimes, after you have agreed on the prices of development services, some unexpected difficulties arise that may increase the cost significantly.

The solution to minimizing risks associated with estimate and project cost increases lies in the requirements elaboration stage.

First, the software development company makes a detailed list of all your technical and business requirements to highlight what professionals are necessary for the project. Then, after creating a portrait of an ideal candidate, they can provide you with the preliminary cost for these professionals.

All in all, it is important to reach common ground with an agency before the process of selecting the right candidates starts.

2. No Control Over the Project

When companies hire a development team, they are often worried about a lack of control. However, dedicated developers work according to the client’s guides and all the tasks are managed on the client’s side.

For example, at MLSDev we use the following tools, that you can grant access for project management:

• JIRA for project task management
• Harvest for time tracking and billing
• GitHub and GitLab for source code management
• Jenkins and GitLab CI for Continuous Integration

A good team of developers should be able to quickly adjust to the model that you use within your company. These teams are aware and have experience of working according to the well-proven software development methodologies to control the process, namely:

• Scrum - suitable for medium to large projects that last from 4 months to years, utilizes 5-9 developers
• Kanban - used when you need to quickly deliver a security patch, fix bugs, or add a new feature to your app
• Lean - ideal for a rapidly changing environment that requires a high level of flexibility with project requirements that change often

Software Development Process

3. Limited Resources

When you hire app developers to handle your product, you might be worried that they will also work on other projects aside from yours. Professional agencies provide a complete overview of the completed work of the dedicated resources with a report from tracking tools (e.g. Harvest).

When you hire a dedicated development team or other distinct specialists, you can easily scale your team to meet your project’s requirements. Professional IT vendors usually have a pool of accessible developers and a well-settled process to hire and augment your team with extra resources on demand.

Cooperation Process with an Outsourced Team

This way, your project will be released on time, even if you decide to add some complex functionality along the way.

4. Time Zone Difference

The difference in time zones can cause ineffective cooperation, which is a huge concern when you hire a development team.

At the same time, it can become the main advantage. For example, when working with a team from Eastern Europe (e.g. Ukraine) and you provide your feedback, developers get it early in the morning and can fix them right away. This way, you get the necessary updates directly the next day.

When you hire a dedicated development team from another country or continent, make sure that you have a full overview of the communication methods used.

Time Zone Differences in the World Map

5. Differences in Culture

When working with a professional outsourcing company, you shouldn’t have any problems regarding cultural differences. To make sure that you hire a dedicated team that has a proper business approach, pay attention to the following aspects:

• Proven software development processes and experience working with different clients from all over the world
• Readiness to undergo the technical assessment and complete tech tasks
• Ability for fast team scaling with highly professional specialists
• Guaranteed employee retention
• Readiness to undertake all operational and administrative processes
• On-demand expert assistance from other specialists like Software Architects, Development Leads, etc.
• Provided consultation services for continuous product improvement

6. Сommunication Issues

Some concerns may be associated with communication and effectiveness. Companies that decide to hire a software development team should pay close attention to the English level and availability of written documentation.

To make sure that you won’t encounter problems in the future, during the process of hiring a software development team or similar, talk over these aspects. Check the level of English and documentation to eliminate any misunderstandings.

Besides, we live in an era of digitalization where time differences can be handled with the help of modern collaboration tools:

• Video conferencing and screen-sharing tools (e.g Zoom, Google Hangouts, Slack)
• Project management tools (e.g. JIRA)
• Document-sharing for revision (e.g. InDesign, Figma can be shared to check designs at any time)

7. Issues with Security & Data Privacy

What if my idea is stolen or code is reused somewhere else?

Many businesses ask these questions when they hire a development team. Signing NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) is one of the ways to ensure the safety of your idea and business.

As well, it is possible to ensure limited access to documentation regarding your project and implement the best server security protocols. Professional outsourcing companies go out of their way to ensure that no one will get access to secret data and jeopardize your project.

For example, at MLSDev we store all source code in privately hosted security repositories powered by GitLab, and use securely hosted services like Confluence, Google Drive, etc. We are also ready to sign an NDA to ensure that all the materials you share with your team will be kept confidential.

How to Approach Dedicated Software Development Team

When you hire a dedicated development team, it is vital to take into consideration the above aspects that can significantly influence cooperation with the vendor. You can mitigate the risks to your business by choosing a company with many years of experience and a vast number of successfully delivered projects.

Questions to Evaluate & Hire a Dedicated Development Team

When you move on to the negotiation stage, you can further evaluate the professionalism and reliability of the vendor that provides you with programmers by asking a few questions like:

• What is the pool of specialists that you have access to?
• How do you ensure the retention of developers working inside your offices?
• Are you able to quickly scale the team without losing the quality and abiding to high standards?
• Can you guarantee that team members won’t leave the project underway?
• Are you ready to undergo technical assessment and perform test tasks?
• How do you approach operational and administrative processes?
• Do you provide on-demand assistance from other specialists?
• What is the process for dealing with time zone differences?
• Can you describe the process of communication between developers and my company?
• How does your company deal with cultural differences and differences in language?
• What processes and solutions do you use to ensure the safety of my project idea?
• How do you ensure that my code won’t be reused anywhere else or sold to someone?

Fixed Time Contract vs. Dedicated Team

Based on their answers, you will be able to evaluate how a company deals with the development and management processes, and how they address the potential issues.

Bottom Line: Hire a Dedicated Team & Reach Your Goals

When you decide to hire a development team, you will need to choose between hiring individual developers or a team. The latter option is popular among businesses that need high-quality development.

Working with a Dedicated Team has a number of benefits, namely:

• Lower IT expenses – by working with a team of developers, you don’t need to worry about an office, equipment, taxes, and other associated expenses with new staff. You only pay for the development services and your vendor takes care of everything else.
• Wide choice of tech expertise – thanks to modern technologies, you are not limited in the choice of developers. You can work with specialists from all over the world and hire even the rarest talents.
• Full control – working with such developers is like having your own in-house software development department. This outsourcing model grants you full control over the development and transparency of all processes.

Client Business & MLSDev as a Dedicated Team

It is possible to enjoy all of the above benefits by choosing the right IT vendor and outsource web development that saves you money and develops high-quality products. You need to look for a company that will become your reliable tech partner through the years to come.

At MLSDev, we have a well-established process for assembling a dedicated development team based on your project needs. Starting from requirement collection, selection, and evaluation of the candidates, to the parts related to legal and administrative processes, as well as integration of new programmers into your business environment - all these steps are covered.

Frequently Asked Questions: