Background: Our leads and clients have often asked us, what is the best way to evaluate and decide which mobile app development studio for the project? That is a tough question to answer. Our previous article on picking the right mobile app development studio in Singapore shed some light on the topic, but it is a really complicated question and I felt that the previous article still lacks some degree of depth.
I’ve been on the client side, managing vendors for my bosses, have developed software for more than half my life, and am now the Managing Director of Originally US, an award-winning mobile app development studio. I thought it would be interesting and beneficial to share my honest perspectives on the topic to our client and leads.
To that end, I’ve embarked on the process on writing a mini guidebook, to be distributed as an ebook format once it is completed. In this book, I try to be as entertaining as possible, while covering a potentially very dry and complicated topic. I hope that works out.
New chapters will be made available here on a weekly basis (I try my best).
Chapter 1.1 – Don’t Mess Up The Tender Process
Foreword – Mobile App Development Landscape
Never before in the history of mankind has developers been in higher demand.
Developers used to be mythical creatures, seldom seen in the public, barely comprehended, hidden away in banks and space agencies, banging away at keyboards.
Programming was regarded as sacred work. Developers were the ones responsible for sending people to the moon, or moving billions of dollars across corporations and nations.
In these enlightened days, the perception towards this once sacred craft has changed. While developers in the past wrote 145,000 lines of code for the Apollo 11 space mission, it takes an estimated 603,343 lines of code just so that people can play a make-believe computer game about monsters that comes out in the dark.
Developers no longer fly people to space. They make games about monsters and vampires. We are now flooded with all kinds of applications developed for the mass market.
The emergence of mobile applications (or mobile apps) – applications that run on your mobile devices opened new opportunities for end-users and consumers alike. Never before has the human race been able to interact with software so intimately. There are now all kinds of mobile apps in the market, ranging from apps for taking a beautiful selfie to finding someone to send food or groceries to your home. There are even apps that tracks how many times you pee in a day!
The numbers of developers in the world has exploded due to demands. Developers are no longer sacred, learned beings hidden away in unknown back offices. This means that while developers in the past are most talented to be in their jobs, developers now come in all shapes and sizes and variety widely in competency levels.
While many organisations understand the need to embark on the development of one or more mobile apps for a variety of business purposes, there has also been a large number of mobile app initiatives that failed.
Many have been scratching their heads over outsourcing failures that cost organisations hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of man days.
The reason for these failure, I posit, is that no one in the industry has really tried putting together a comprehensive guide for avoid common pitfalls when outsourcing your mobile app.
In this short ebook, I have put together some of my observations, thoughts and insights, written as someone on the inside of this industry. I will discuss some of the common reasons why mobile app outsourcing projects fail, how to differentiate strong mobile app development studios from the less desirable ones, and some ‘rules of engagement’ that can help you get the most out of your next outsourced mobile app initiative.
While this book is written in the context of the Singapore, many of the notes discussed are also relevant beyond the borders of Singapore.
