Written by Steven Brough on February 27th, 2009

Developing your Software with the Right People

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“As an employer/ webmaster what are my responsibilities?” Project planning and Outsourcing Software Development is not an easy task; it basically involves these processes:

• Planning/ Analysis,
• Programming,
• Installation,
• User testing and maintenance.

Some of these project planning steps relating to outsourcing software development are in conflict with one another. As an employer, you start off with analyzing the problem and set your plans/ objectives with the help of a programmer. Once they are done, the programmer would take these plans and start the programming phase. During this phase, you should give feedback to your programmer on a regular basis. This will help your programmer will keep focus and his eyes on your objectives.

When the program is finished, the next step is installing your program to where you will use it (production environment). Then last of all, you will need to test the program (user testing) to see if it really works and to discover any bugs and errors. Ideally, user testing should be done at regular intervals especially on large projects, testing as a whole may be quite time consuming. If the project is small, then testing at the end is often acceptable. Once the program is running smoothly, then you just need to maintain it. 

It is true that each of four steps conflict with one other; especially if they are all done by one person. User testing should be done by you or another programmer. If you give the responsibility of testing to the one who created the code, then he may just tell you that the program is perfect and error free so that he can run off with your money. If you are new to this line of work, then you will most likely be outwitted by your programmer. 

“I am having a hard time finding my programmer and tester.”

If you are having a hard time finding the right person for the job, don’t worry. There are a lot of people on the internet looking for people like you, a potential employer. You just have to look for them on any of these freelancing websites. Scriptlance, Freelancer~GAF, RentACoder or Elance . These are websites wherein skilled individuals are looking for people who are in need of their services. Good luck and remember this if it is all you take away with you “its all in the plan, get your plan right, ask for the right things, and you can have whatever you want..”, Happy developing!