How to Choose the Right Custom Software Development Company? - Your 10-Step Guide to Find the Answer

Is your business stuck on the question - “How to choose the right custom software development company for developing our solution model?”. With so many options available online it can be overwhelming to pinpoint which service provider is the best fit for your business. Here’s a 10-step guide to help you make a logical decision!

As an entrepreneur, you often make pivotal decisions that impact the short & long-term operations of your business. In order to make these decisions you have to ask a few vital questions to yourself, one such question would be - “How to choose the right custom software development company for our business?”. If you’re in this scenario, then first of all, congratulations on taking the right approach toward fixing your business’ automation needs!

There are a lot of factors that collectively decide the expertise of a custom software development company, ranging from their ability to understand your business requirements to their problem-solving abilities. But these aren’t the only things you need to look out for, some service providers initially nod in agreement to everything you say. You can literally ask them to make an enterprise application under a thousand bucks and they will agree just to get you in as a client. The following disappointment (or disaster!) shouldn’t be a hard guess!

Instead, try looking for service providers who would - 

1. provide you with an honest and reasonable outline of your project 
2. keep themselves up-to-date with the current market situation, and
3. prioritize the quality of your product above everything

This guide will help you find them!

Let’s Discuss Your Custom Software Solution

Step 1: Define Your Project Goals at a High Level

The first step towards choosing the right custom software development company is to start discussing your project with the service providers and asking them whether they can replicate your vision into a fully functioning solution model. This step may look simple, but speaking from experience, most clients fumble in this step itself. It is not expected of you to write a detailed encyclopedia about your requirements, rather, a small organized document about your high-level expectations from the project will do just fine. Just make sure it has enough information to convey your ideas clearly to the service provider of your choice.

Don’t worry if your team doesn’t have a strong technical background, our custom software developers will be happy to fill in the technical gaps within your requirement sheet. With a solid picture of your requirements ready you can be assured that your ideas are properly reflected in your final product, with absolutely zero room for any misinterpretation.

Step 2: Search For the Company That Aligns With Your Business Goals

Got your requirement sheet ready? Excellent! Now, we can move on to the next step, which is finding service providers with expertise in developing solutions that align with your current business goals. But where to start? How to choose the right custom software development company from the plethora of options out there? These are pretty valid concerns. But, like every other problem out there, there is a solution to this as well. Here are the two major ways to initiate your quest - 

1. Via Google Search

when it comes to looking for professional services, something as simple as a Google search can be the most optimal way to find the best service providers from all across the world. You being here is most likely the result of a similar situation where you asked for a certain service and our website popped up. And if that’s the case you probably know how easy it is to find companies that provide custom software development services. Just a simple prompt like - “Best custom software development companies”, and Google will cherry-pick the best available options based on its algorithm, for you!

2.Via Listing Websites

another way to find the right service provider to develop your solution would be to check out popular listing websites, the most popular example of these websites would be Clutch.co. The benefit of using a listing website is that you can compare multiple service providers based on parameters like - location, rating, company size, service rates, etc…

Once you have explored enough options using these methods you can jump on to the shortlisting process for further analysis.

Step 3: Evaluate the Experience & Technical Expertise of the Company

This is a tricky one. In most cases evaluating the expertise of a custom software development company can be a hit-or-miss situation. A lot of service providers out there will claim to provide you with “the best services in the market at the cheapest rates” just to draw your attention. Only when you start working with these companies do you realize that it is quite impossible to balance both ends of the scale for any service provider. So how do you differentiate between a genuinely experienced custom software development firm and a service provider pretending to be one? It’s simple. You just need to take a two-step approach here - 

1. Check their Projects

Companies often feature projects on their website to showcase their expertise in a specific use case. Spending some time exploring these projects and checking out the demonstrations gives you a decent understanding of the service provider’s expertise in that particular sector.

2. Reach Out to the Consultants

Reach Out to the Consultants - Sometimes, the service providers are not allowed to feature the projects they developed for a certain client because they are developed under a strict non-disclosure agreement. Now in that situation, instead of just assuming that they do not have the required experience in developing your project, you can simply send them the project outlines you defined for starters. The consultants will promptly inform you if they have the required expertise for your solution or not. You can easily contact them via an email, or give them the description via a call-to-action button. Like the one, we have below!

Discuss Your Custom Software with BinaryFolks

Step 4: Verify Your Service Provider’s Techstack

Custom software development is all about harnessing the latest technologies available in the market to develop solutions that fix the bottlenecks or streamline the operations within a business. However, to develop high-quality software, just a basic level of knowledge for the latest technologies won’t be enough. The developers must possess hands-on experience with the techniques and A-Z know-hows of the technology under discussion.

Considering how rapidly the technology world evolves these days, it is super important to keep in mind that the developers cannot just stick to the old traditional methodologies where they could breeze through their entire career while having expertise in a single language. To keep up with the latest market trends, every developer within a company should be eager to train themselves with the latest technologies & relevant advancements emerging every day. And leverage their functionalities to provide you with cutting-edge solutions.

Step 5: Check if the Delivery Time of the Project Is Justified

Based on the entire scope and complexity of the project you should pre-establish a deadline for the complete development and deployment of your project, this helps you avoid unnecessarily stretched working hours and slacking behavior from the development team. Our preferred way out is to break down the entire project into smaller milestones, each milestone includes a few additional features or functionality added to the model. We like to define a fixed deadline for each of these milestones and strictly follow the schedule. Now in case you’re not sure how long it takes to develop a certain kind of custom software, here’s a table to provide you with a basic idea -

It should be noted that these are generalized estimates of how long it takes to develop a custom software of said complexity. The exact development time will vary depending on various factors, for example, the number of features you want to add or the security protocols you wish to integrate.

Additionally, if your business has an in-house development team, they can spend some time evaluating the progress of the solution model and figuring out better ways to utilize the software solution.

Step 6: Understand the Importance of a Seamless Communication Line

This is probably the most important non-technical aspect of a development process. A seamless communication channel is a non-negotiable factor when it comes to choosing the right software development company for your project. Why? Because software development is a complicated process, and in many cases, the final product is significantly different from the initial draft of the software’s framework in the BRD.

Relaying these additional changes, providing general updates regarding the project, or discussing issues identified during testing & evaluation, all of these require an agile and disruption-free communication line. This ensures that the service providers and the clients are always on the same page, it also helps the clients to get a clear picture of the solution model that they are getting; without any false expectations or misinterpretations about certain aspects of the solution.

You should analyze the communication pattern of your service providers early on, it’s not super complicated you just need to keep in mind a few subtle details - 

1. Understanding your Requirements: the ability of a service provider to understand your business requirements ensures that your project will be developed exactly the way you want it.
2. Proactiveness: considering the service providers have a higher level of expertise than your company in that specific matter, it is important to note down the additional ideas and upgrades the service providers are suggesting.
3. Clarity in Communication: notice their way of conveying the messages, whether they are elaborated and easy to understand, or they use way too many technical lingos that go right past your head.
4. Availability: the fact that your service provider is promptly available to clear out your project-related questions or not is very important throughout the project cycle.

Want a custom software solution that was tailor-made for your business needs? BinaryFolks’ development services are the perfect match for you!

Step 7: Make Sure They Focus on UI/UX the Same Way They Focus on the Architecture

Consider this, your team spent months collaborating with an outsourced service provider to develop a solution that has the perfect functionality for your business requirements. However post-development, the UI looks like something straight out of a 1970s sci-fi movie. That doesn’t sound very appealing now, does it? This is even more destructive if your goal is to develop a consumer app with its entire model based on attracting more and more customers to try out your applications.

Alternatively, if your application was designed with an engaging and user-friendly interface it will make the marketing of your application super easy, all you have to do is get the users to try your software once. The engaging UI/UX will handle the part of making them recurring users for your application, meaning your choice of software development service provider can impact the future of your application’s marketing and distribution planning. Here are a few important factors that we like to address while designing the UI for our applications -

Step 8: Analyze Their Development Procedure

So, we have reached the part where you finally get the answer to your “How to choose the right custom software development company for my business” question. When it comes to custom software development companies, Scrum and Agile are the two most popular development methods, as they help businesses to collaborate effectively with their service providers. Adaptability during the development process plays a major role in determining the effectiveness of the final product. Going by the book(the BRD, in this context) may seem to be a safer approach for the service providers. But, keeping your eyes open for improvement in the application’s architecture during development is what differentiates an ideal service provider from a regular service provider.

Here’s our software development approach that harnesses cutting-edge technologies to develop tailor-made solutions for our partners -

Step 9: Understand their Testing and Quality Assurance Protocols

To provide a solution with the best possible quality, the testing and quality assurance of the project should begin right after the minimal viable product(MVP) is developed. The service providers should run a feedback loop system where your technical team gets the opportunity to test the progress of the software after each milestone is achieved.

If you want your service provider to testify about their quality assurance and problem-fixing protocols, there are a few questions you may ask them. Depending on their answers you can decide whether they are the right match for your business, or not -

1. How do you handle regression testing to ensure any new updates or changes to the solution model do not generate new issues?
2. Do you practice user acceptance testing services to ensure the application is working properly in the intended environment?
3. What tools or protocols do you use to test the application for any issues?

These questions will help you better understand the proficiency of the service providers when it comes to testing your solution model for any issues. 

Step 10: Ask for Post Development Services

Make sure your service providers don't “Au Revoir” their way out, right after they finish integrating the application within your business environment, leaving your solution to become more and more outdated every day. To keep your application’s competitive edge sharp, it is necessary to continuously improve the application. You should keep updating it with the latest features and technologies being introduced in the market every day. And who can do this better than the development team that built the application from scratch? 

Discuss these requirements with your service provider while drafting the project’s agreement. Ensure that the service providers will assist you with your business goals and provide you with the necessary services as a recurring task even after the main project cycle is completed. Additionally, you can also ask the service provider to schedule maintenance runs to check the overall health & performance of your solution model.

Conclusion

Phew, that was a lot of steps! But on the bright side, now you know everything you should keep an eye out for while choosing the right custom software development company to develop your solution model. What? Still, have some stones unturned…? No bueno. Send your questions our way, we will be happy to get back to you with a detailed solution. Or, if one-on-one discussions are your thing, how about we promptly discuss it over a meeting? Your call honestly!

Talk to Our Custom Software Consultants!