Software development is a time-consuming and cumbersome process. It is a dynamic process that incurs different costs and requirements. To meet the needs, several organizations rely on IT staff augmentation company to provide valuable technical resources.
The demand for augmenting contractual basis external staff has grown to an extensive extent in recent times. It is due to the rapid globalization of businesses across extensive quarters and the requirement to deploy software projects on time.
Companies look for different ways to make their teams run seamlessly and in-active mode throughout the software development process. Hence, staff augmentation is an enterprise-level strategy for several organizations to create a mix of internal and external team members to function seamlessly.
In this blog, you will find how augmenting staff from an external outsourcing partner results in managing software projects effectively. And, most importantly increasing the team productivity and performance to an optimum extent.
Teams aligned together and ensure clear communication
To ensure increased team productivity for the success of software development, make sure to maintain seamless communication among all. It is imperative for understanding the development, designing, testing, and other such requirements. Transparency is further required while working with the staff augmentation members.
So, as an organization, you can follow particular ways to maintain seamless alignment between internal and external resources wisely.
- Assign a certain position or a task to a dedicated member as per the availability. For example, if you require an experienced development professional working dedicatedly on the project, then rely on the augmented member. On the other side, bestow other responsibilities to the in-house staff that has to take care of multiple projects internally.
- Ensure communication is clear and the same information reaches across the internal and external staff. Make sure everyone has relevant access to documents, software, and tools to enhance the software development lifecycle. Especially, remote employees (augmented members) must have the desired access.
- Another beneficial way to increase a team’s productivity is delegating tasks appropriately. It is possible by dividing the duties across members based on their profiles. In terms of the external staff, it is already clear while hiring a developer from a reliable IT staff augmentation service company in India or anywhere else.
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Well-defined roles & proper workflow management
Software development must be having a clear idea of defining roles and maintaining a smooth workflow within the organization. They must offer defined roles to the augmented members hired externally to prevent any dilemma. It is relevant to create tasks uniformly across particular members based on experience, skill, capacity, and requirement. Also, this process will enable every technical resource (internal and external) to work collaboratively and efficiently.
Several times, tech organizations face the daunting challenge of not determining the current skill gap and what needs to achieve. Thus, decide beforehand what to achieve and check the talent gap within the organization and create a perfect balance.
A binding factor in defining particular roles among in-house and augmented resources is creating a single-directional workflow. When every role is predecided, responsibilities are divided, and communication is dispersed, then the flow of work runs effectively.
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Documentation of the coding
One of the key aspects of successful software development is preparing the coding documentation for the relevant team. Everything is written and preplanned has a positive effect on the task ahead. Similarly, the development team must pay special emphasis to document all the coding using any of the following ways.
- Using Code Comments: Code comments are the simplest and most user-friendly form of documentation required for developing software efficiently. It is a document that contains all the requirements, design, and other elements mentioned inside. In some cases, code comments can be used to better understand which is written near the code and effectively initiate or debug the same. This can be of great help for developers to thoroughly understand and follow the development process without wasting any effort.
- Preparing Test Cases: Another common yet imperative method of documenting code is preparing advanced test cases for each class. A test case comprises the list of steps that a tester will follow while ensuring the correctness of a particular software component.
- UML Diagrams: These are the diagrams best interpreted by software engineers to visualize the system architecture. The different components of the software are mentioned in boxes along with connecting lines to display the relationship. To document code, developers distinctive choices of diagrams, flow charts, design patterns, or anything.
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Team collaboration with fractional CTO
Several enterprises are pairing the external staff with fractional CTO services to increase software development productivity. A fractional CTO is an experienced chief technical officer that helps to enhance the development process and improves all the intricacies.
Under the leadership of such experienced professionals, external members will understand the importance of continuous improvement and showcasing leadership skills. This method of embracing innovation not just helps the augmented members but also internal staff to showcase performance brilliance and an upscaled level of productivity.
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Make use of management tools & technology
There are some technical ways you can adopt to enrich the overall productivity of in-house and remote development teams. Think about using specific project management tools and technology to share information, and files, view tasks, assign work and check work status single-handedly.
Organizations that employ any sort of project management tool or platform perform much better, save on development costs, and streamline work efficiency.
Just for reference, we have mentioned a few project management tools that you can think of implying at the workplace.
- Trello
- Asana
- ClickUp
- Basecamp
- WorkZone
And, several others.
Concluding Thoughts
Staff augmentation members working collaboratively with in-house specialists ensure optimum productivity, development efficiency, and on-time deployment. Still, there are several ways to enrich the overall production efficiency and work progress.
Embrace both the augmented staff and effective productivity factors to improve development progress and overall business ROI.
Rely on staff augmentation services to fill the current resource gap, reduce recruitment costs, and bring collaborative work efficiency.
