How to Evaluate a Software Development Company’s Technical Expertise?

• By Sarrah Pitaliya
• 19-06-2023
• Software

Stand by the line - investing in custom next-gen software solutions is essential if your company wants to stay on top. And one of the best ways to do so is by deploying custom software development services that can help you to scale your business by addressing your needs and requirements. It’s a fast-tech world, and competition in the market is at an all-time high for every industrial sector; therefore, business digitization is the primary step. In such scenarios, you can hire the best custom software development company that knows what’s right for your business.

According to a Statista report, the software market globally is expected to reach a valuation of USD 858.10 billion by 2028. These statistics determine the requirement for hiring the best custom software development company.

Most companies in today’s technologically advanced times prefer to outsource software development partners, making it a widespread practice. This is giving rise to several software development companies increasing in the market and rising consumer and market demands. Therefore, opting for your company’s trusted software development partner sometimes gets challenging. It can cause the market to get superheated and makes it trickier to choose dependable custom software development services to work with.

Feeling stressed already? Nothing to fear when I’m here.

This article is dedicated explicitly to you. Here, we’ll learn about different things to consider when hiring a custom software development company.

So, why wait?

Let’s wear our Sherlock hats and begin the investigation. And heads up, it will be a long yet exciting ride.

The Process to Decide the Best Software Development Company

Selecting your custom software development services is a complex process. However, you need not worry because firstly, we’ll start with primary considerations and then discuss the essential factors to consider for each business case. There are four major phases of choosing a software development partner. Although one of these phases is known as “evaluation,” in reality, evaluation occurs during each portion of the vendor selection procedure. As a manager, you need to take care of a few things, such as,

Check if all your business needs can be satisfied

Evaluate the domain expertise of your vendor

Have open communication with the potential partner and assess it

So, to help you define the crucial areas in assessing potential service providers, remain objective, and never get confused in the pool of diverse options available in the software development market, I suggest conducting success inspections as a software developer. Ask yourself the questions (mentioned below) as you proceed through the vendor selection phases.

1. Requirements

In this phase, you usually create expectations on cooperation with a custom software development services provider and define activities to assign. You can start by considering priorities, specifying taboos and software development methodologies, and deciding on criteria when searching for a partner.

Questions you should ask:

• What are my business priorities I would never compromise on?
• What is the must-have in my custom software development company?
• What all I’ll not accept at any cost?
• What are the criteria I’ll use for evaluation?

2. Research

Once you determine the objective you want your business to achieve with software solutions and understand how to evaluate your success, you must thoroughly study and research the market. This phase involves recognizing the potential candidates by surfing various ranking services.

Questions you should ask:

• What resources are available publicly?
• What publicly available resources can I use for evaluation?
• What is the rating my potential software company should have?
• How can a company help me meet my current business needs?

3. Request for Proposal (RFP) and Analysis Phases

RFP and analysis need maximum participation in the evaluation process. Therefore, by generating an RFP, you describe your business and specify your needs and market objectives; processing the data you acquire seems complex. During these two phases, you must opt for different methodologies to evaluate a vendor’s knowledge and expertise objectively. You need to follow some best practices during these phases. Best practices include recognizing existing and past customers, asking about their software solutions, their experience with a company, feedback, and analyzing testimonials. I also suggest you develop a list of questions and doubts and talk directly to your potential service providers for on-the-point answers.

4. Evaluation and Decision Phase

It’s also essential to conduct Q&A sessions with your potential candidates is a common approach for evaluating a custom software development company. Before moving to the research, analysis, and RFP phases, you must understand how each company deals with your project specifications. After that, you should focus on finding out more about each of your potential partners. Understand very carefully how exactly a vendor will address your project specifications, ask about the process of developing software solutions, and maintain open and transparent communication. During these phases, manage all your questions and requirements with potential vendors. Afterward, you must ask yourself questions to understand how you feel about each provider and decide.

Questions you should ask:

• What can a custom software development company offer for my specific needs?
• Will my business be satisfied with the terms for onboarding and staffing?
• Is there anything specific I need in my software solution?
• Is there any significant thing the potential vendor didn’t include in the proposal?

These phases and questions can vary depending on your understanding of the evaluation process and the approaches suggested by potential custom software development service providers. Simultaneously, it's essential to understand the phases of choosing a software development partner so you can think of vendor selection comprehensively.

However, you need a good vendor list for the perfect vector. Wondering what is vendor list? You can get all the answers in the following section.

Understanding Everything about Vendor List

When you have some software vendors in mind, you might consider generating a list of all the potential software vendors, known as a vendors list. It is vital to make this list if your project has several stakeholders, and it's not possible for all of them to communicate personally with those vendors. Therefore, the main objective of this list is to simplify stakeholders’ expectations to find a match that satisfies the stakeholders' expectations.

Okay, four other business owners or stakeholders (besides you) are involved in choosing and hiring a custom software development company. Here, one stakeholder is responsible for conducting initial research and analysis and opting for the 15 or more best custom software development services providers that suit your needs best. The same one should also be responsible for the initial screening of candidates and filtering them according to their price, location, and other essential criteria. The second stakeholder, the vice president or a C-level executive should perform a more in-depth analysis of different standards.

As you move forward to the following evaluation phases and ask yourself more critical questions, you can easily filter, and fewer candidates remain. When you summarize the work done by stakeholders, you may verify their candidatures with the board of directors to make a united decision and choose the best custom software company.

How to Choose Software Provider Based on Your Requirements?

Some business requirements are general, while others may differ depending on your domain and business type. You should consider all the needs, whether domain-specific or generic, objective or subjective, to find an ideal match.

Basic Criteria for Evaluation

A purposeful evaluation usually includes determining the criteria for hiring a custom software development company and following their guidance until you find the ideal vendor that helps satisfy all your business needs and requirements. Let’s now understand what most business owners use for evaluating the best custom software development services provider:

Domain Expertise: The most significant advantage of working with domain professionals is the capability to grow your team with subject experts. As an outcome, you can improve your product delivery terms and build an efficient software product.

Technical Expertise: It is one of the most crucial factors to consider when assessing your custom software development company. Evaluating technical expertise involves checking if your software partner can offer the necessary tech stack and proper code quality analysis, the ability to create software solutions like IoT solutions and cloud-computing solutions an approach towards different technological innovations.

Pricing Range: You can find the prices of your potential service providers on different sites like Upwork, Clutch, and many other ranking platforms. And if you are looking for a more accessible way, you can also directly request a quote on the company’s website.

Years of Experience: Looking for company maturity and experience can have profound benefits when a reliable outsourcing partner. Maturity involves the overall time a business has been present in the market, its expertise, its growth, its employees, and its evolution. Moreover, you can also evaluate the number of successful product deployments, and client retention rates, because it helps you understand how stable the company is.

Clients and References: To identify the focus of a software outsourcing company, it’s essential to check the types of customers the provider works with. These customers include start-ups, FinTech, niche businesses, enterprises, other software development companies, or IT consultants. Apart from checking out profiles of potential software companies on different rating platforms, organizations can also review testimonials or case studies directly on the company website.

Important Criteria for Evaluation

While touchstones like technical expertise, domain expertise, price range, and clients are significant for initial evaluation phases, moving forward, you need to ask additional questions about your potential software service providers. Following are some non-trivial factors you can take into consideration when choosing a custom software development company:

Long-Term Cooperation: Providing long-term cooperation is the most important signal of your vendor’s reliability. So, to evaluate a software company’s determination and loyalty to its clients, it’s pretty enough to verify the amount of long-term collaboration and the case studies behind them.

Technological Rapidness: It’s vital to opt for a vendor who can understand your ideas and make a proper decision to deploy a specific technology stack, use their knowledge and experience to imply the best possible tech stack options, and be quick if there’s something to be changed or improved on the tech side. They also take care if no experts are available for a specific technology and try to search, hire, train, and onboard them. For instance, they should hire and train certified software developers from a particular domain if your software project requires it.

Social Values: Sharing the same values, ideas, and philosophies is another standard for solid collaboration. Following similar ideologies often helps businesses to start long-lasting relationships with huge conglomerates. Therefore, when evaluating your custom software development service providers, take the suitable time to dive into how their workforce spends their spare time, team spirit, social lives, the corporate environment, and whatever else you think is essential for your company.

Stable Organization Growth: A company’s stable growth contributes to its experience and reliability. And what deserves focus are the dynamics shown in emergencies and rough times. The Covid-19 pandemic has pinpointed the requirement for a flexible approach to changing scenarios (good or bad) and emphasized the progress presented by the top market leaders during the lockdown.

How to Make the Correct Choice?

Therefore, it's imperative to carefully select your potential custom software development services provider as they contribute to the success of your business and help it grow. In this guide, I’ve enlisted some tips and tricks (or some critical factors) for evaluating your software development partners. But eventually, everything depends on you, and the choice is yours. Following are some crucial takeaways from this article:

First, evaluate how your company's requirements are met at the six phases of the software development partner selection process.

To know if your needs are being addressed, ask yourself some relevant questions about the software solution ideas each software provider suggests in answer to your specifications.

If your software solution involves several stakeholders, generate a vendor list for a mutual understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of working with each provider and make a collaborative decision.

When assessing your potential provider, don’t avoid significant standards like vendor expertise, location, and technological experience. Simultaneously, the domain expertise of a software development company and your specific software needs and requirements.

So, think and hire a custom software development company for your software solutions and follow this guide thoroughly to make sound decisions.