17 Questions You Asked about Remote Development Teams

Hire Remote Developers as a Successful Business Strategy

The traditional model of hiring employees steps back to give way for more effective, proactive, but at the same time more complex models. The practice to bring aboard a distributed team has been embraced by startups, SMEs and even big enterprises. Since the global IT market opens cost-cutting benefits, a broader pool of talents, and an excellent quality of services, companies around the world see nearshoring as a great advantage to have exemplary quality, timely delivery, smart labor costs, and diversity. Companies that decide on nearshoring and hire a remote development team encounter dozens of questions that must be answered. We are here to shed light on the confusion that has been shunning you from nearshoring for many years.

Question #1 What Is a Distributed Team?

A distributed team is a collection of IT professionals who work for the common goal of your company at distance. From startups to tech giants, corporations all over the world find world-class specialists who eventually become virtual staff members.

With over 160.000 seasoned and experienced talents in Ukrainian IT market, Mobilunity selects the best ones to match your goals and meet your expectations. A well-trained recruitment team at our company will guide you through the process of selecting the candidate to find suitable developers as well as remote QA engineers. 

Question #2 Why May I Need a Remote Development Team? 

Most nearshoring clients hire remote developers for large-scope projects to receive quality operations from talents worldwide. Another reason for hiring remote teams is to cut the labor costs, especially for startups that are interested in professional upscale development services with cost-effective benefits.

Searching for talents around the world can give you a competitive advantage since qualified and dedicated software engineers are able to grow your business in the best possible way. Moreover, imagine that you are in control of technical and managerial tasks, while the employees’ retention is put on a vendor’s side.

Question #3 How to Find Remote Software Developers? 

The world is overflowed with IT digital nomads who possess an immense desire to accelerate your growth. Before you hire anyone, you have three options: find freelancers, use the services of outsourcing companies, or build a dedicated development team. The biggest possible challenge with freelancers is that you can’t properly assess their quality, be sure that they will meet the deadlines, or won’t quit your project for no solid reasons. By outsourcing your project, you get a quality team of professionals who are controlled by a vendor; however, you will have no access to the project development itself or direct interaction with your team. Nearshoring model, on the other hand, allows you to take full control of your remote team, schedule virtual and personal meetings, and track the progress on a daily basis.

In Mobilunity, once we get a full profile of a client’s project as well as requirements for the candidates, within two weeks on average our recruitment team will offer you a shortlist of best-possible specialists.

Question #4 How to Hire Remote Developers of Required Expertise? 

As was partially mentioned in the first answer, in order for a nearshoring vendor to know exactly what you need, your part in this is to brainstorm the key skills and experience that your potential candidates must possess. For instance, you decided to create an online-banking mobile application. The most crucial aspect you should define is a tech stack to execute the project. And apart from evaluating developer’s tech skills, you should also consider having candidates with expertise in the finance industry.

Since the Ukrainian IT market counts around 190,000 specialists, Mobilunity’s recruitment team is operating on numerous platforms that contain the profiles of best country’s specialists to build a remote development team. We consider your requirements while evaluating the pool of candidates as well as conduct a thorough testing stage to verify the accordance of knowledge with the one given in the CV.

Question #5 Are There Legal Implications of Having Remote Developers?

Legal implications is probably one of the most common initial concerns of potential nearshoring clients. Besides typical legal matters of employment such as working hours and wage rates, you want to be clarified on intellectual property rights. In order to secure your IP rights, you need to discuss what aspects of your project must not go public or be used in other subsidiary projects except yours.

In Mobilunity, we are highly concerned about the security matters for all our clients. We carefully conduct the negotiations and find out the key details and secret points that should not be revealed further. One of the biggest advantages of the nearshoring model is that the code belongs to you and you are the one who owns all the rights. This is ensured by the NDA and legal agreements signed by both parties.

Question #6 How to Manage Remote Workers?

Discipline is one of the top priorities managers need to set to achieve a company’s goals. With on-site employees, setting daily tasks and delivering them on time can be managed much easier as the developers work next-door. However, the remote-first model has hidden stones since you should only rely on employees’ responsibility and dedication.

Mobilunity is a nearshoring vendor that gives you access to fully control your remote development teams. With this in mind, our clients can track the performance and progress through daily online meetings, reports, and feedback on the process of project development from their hired staff members.

Question #7 What Are the Best Tools for Collaborating with Remote Developers?

Collaboration in business-related aspects means a mutually beneficial and satisfactory working relationship that allows developers to remain productive, and, in return, clients get their expected results. In many ways, collaborations presuppose not only proper and constant communication but also other factors, in particular establishing a corporate culture for remote workers.

While cooperating with Mobilunity, we recommend our clients to stay in touch with their teams not only regarding day-to-day tasks to make them feel valued and appreciated.  Therefore, we encourage our clients to invest even more time in communicating with their dedicated team, include them in corporate newsletter and activities, invite them to join (at least online) corporate presentations, annual reports and host some informal activities to make everyone feel united.

Question #8 Are There Tools to Help Developers Communicate with Remote Developers?

Some companies hire remote developers for a separate project, and some extend their existing in-house teams with remote developers, which requires the cooperation of in-house employees with remote developers. They both need to understand the stages of development, issues that appear, receive clear feedback and report to integrate the processes for achieving a common goal. It all starts with management and trust-building – getting on-site employees together is an easy task, but when it comes to connecting remote and in-house teams it is only possible with identifying suitable channels for communication of both teams.

Mobilunity’s developers are proactive, open-minded, and communicative people who support the communication with clients’ in-house team via Slack, TeamViewer, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and any other software required. Since the customers hold full control of their employees hired from Mobilunity, they control the communication flow and adjust it if needed by any party.

Question #9 Should I Apply Time Clocking for Remote Developers?

A very low percentage of employees feel comfortable working under severe pressure in terms of tracking the actual working hours. Nonetheless, by having a remote team it would be a wise decision to track the time they spend on task completion to make sure you are moving at a good pace. Going crazy in time tracking tools will only harm your collaboration, however, prioritizing urgent or crucial tasks as well as setting deadlines before the project is transferred to the team will guarantee your project fits your timeframe.

Mobilunity’s clients have managed to create reliable and trustworthy relationships with remote development teams by not only initially defining the project’s and key task deadlines but also through establishing daily communication with their developers. The CTOs, in turn, control the technical flow of the project by screening the task success in particular applications.

Question #10 How to Retain the Teams Once You Set Them Up?

Maintaining the remote team is similar to maintaining the in-house one, but instead of you taking care of employee’s overall satisfaction and effectiveness, the nearshoring vendor takes this responsibility. On the other hand, you, as a developer’s direct employer, have the power to contribute to this process by initiating any kind of changes to make sure your team is in a healthy environment.

In Mobilunity, we managed to establish a solid and transparent corporate culture starting from maintaining a good office space to organizing events, birthday celebrations, company’s holidays. We also encourage our clients to join their teams for occasional parties to get to know the team beyond the working setting.

Question #11 How to Manage Remote Developers’ Quality?

Every project within the company has its goal, that further will be growing to other high-impact goals for overall success. Hiring remote teams might lead to the risks of managing their quality of services. The integral part of any type of cooperation is to set clear goals by a manager while breaking the technical flow of a project to small goals. It is vital that the client has a clear development roadmap, keeps track of all tasks using appropriate software and provides regular feedback on developer’s performance.

Our development teams are closely cooperating with the clients’ CTOs, who in turn, provide step-by-step guidance on achieving daily-weekly-monthly goals. Our clients, depending on the project, decide on the task tracking applications that allow them to see the progress and estimate the productivity of the team. One of the most common programs used by Mobilunity’s teams is Jira and Redmine.

Question #12 Do Remote Testers Meet with Developers?

When the coding is done by a development team, it is further sent on the testing stage to fix bugs and check if everything works spotlessly. Most developers consider testers troublemakers and often even criticize their performance. However, the cooperation between these parties is crucial and needs to be managed so that none of them feels offended or humiliated in terms of development pitfalls.

Some of the remote teams in Mobilunity include Quality Assurance engineers among their team members, so they can easily communicate with each other as they are working in one office space. In other cases, when the developers’ team has no testing specialists, they regularly sync-up with their in-house colleagues to make sure their operations are synchronized.

Question #13 What Are Best Tools for Retaining Remote Developers?

The distortion of productivity and overall developers’ motivation can be easily faced since remote teams are missing the essential part of communication – live communication. According to Harvard Business Review, the best way to bear in mind while having remote teams is to decrease affinity distance. Finding a clear and straightforward approach with your remote development team will guard you against misunderstandings and confusion.

Daily calls (preferably with video turned on) and regular visits have become a common practice for Mobilunity’s developers and clients. However, we try to encourage our clients to find and apply the mode of communication which would be comfortable for both parties since some developers might prefer instant messaging or weekly calls, while others support the idea of personal meetings and long Skype calls.

Question #14 How Do You Hire Remote Software Developers for Long Term Projects?

Software developers are a kind of specialists that are ready to spend hours on complex projects trying to implement the peculiarities of cutting-edge technologies. Most IT specialists are not afraid of challenging tasks and laborious projects, since honing the skills is essential for a software engineer. Remote developers’ key factors that drive their decision to accept an offer includes a type of technology used (no one wants to deal with old programming languages or outdated frameworks) and project’s duration.

Considering developers’ needs, Mobilunity always tries to dig into the details of the client’s project to identify crucial information. We also encourage our clients to be open to implement the latest technologies to let developers create a prolific product and stand out from the crowd.

Question #15 Do You Have Stand-Up Meetings with Remote Developers?

Constant feedback and reporting are essential to prevent the project’s workflow from delays caused by miscommunication or a lack of it. Holding daily, weekly, or monthly meetings allows both parties to discuss ongoing issues, task completion progress, identify and solve technical pitfalls with the CTO, and make sure that the project goes as planned.

In Mobilunity, we encourage our clients to organize online meetings with their teams after agreeing the frequency of such with the developers. They decide in which way it is comfortable and productive to communicate or use different approaches at the same time to gain momentum in synchronizing the cooperation.

Question #16 How Do You Solve the Internal (Personal) Issues with Developers? 

There is no magical tool that will make your team spotlessly cooperative and seamless. In fact, remote teams require more attention and careful behavioral analysis when it comes to resolving personal issues among team members.

In order to de-escalate the problems, we communicate, collect feedback, and ask for writing reports regarding the overall satisfaction of the team collaboration. While Mobilunity’s Resource Management team covers that, a client, on the other hand, is involved in the process of finding solutions to pass the roadblocks without considerable pitfalls. At the end of the day – it’s relationships that matter.

Question #17 How to Handle Cultural Barriers? Language? Time Zones Difference?

Cultural barriers usually occur when a client does not know the team properly. Therefore, they may miscommunicate or even face conflicts. In order to prevent issues, the client needs to establish personal connections with his remote employees and try to understand the best approach that will work for both parties.

To break the language barrier, Mobilunity offers all employees English courses and speaking clubs; however, apart from that, Ukrainian developers usually possess at least Upper-Intermediate level of English which is often enough for maintaining communication with their customers.

A big communication barrier lies in the aspect of operating in different time zones, when a US client starts a working day, a team of his developers from Ukraine is going home. A great solution to this inconvenience is to implement flexible hours for employees when, upon agreement, they can start and finish the day later to match the client’s working hours.

Line Up for Success with Your Distributed Team

Going nearshoring can raise numerous questions that should be clarified before hiring a remote development team. These days, nearshoring vendors provide a full-cycle recruitment process as well as further guidance on the project flow to make sure the collaboration has been set. In Mobilunity, besides answering your most-asked questions, we will go an extra mile to get it all right. We are approachable to answer more FAQs regarding technical aspects and remote staff hiring. When exploring the advantages of remote development teams, it’s essential to consider the benefits to hire a freelance software developer as well as the expertise provided by a reputable creative staffing agency to assemble a dynamic and skilled remote team.

Mobilunity will make your doubts fade away quickly and build a distinct distributed team to optimize your business operations. Request a quote and the success will be forthcoming!

All salaries and prices mentioned within the article are approximate NET numbers based on the research done by our in-house Recruitment Team. Please use these numbers as a guide for comparison purposes only and feel free to use the contact form to inquire on the specific cost of the talent according to your vacancy requirements and chosen model of engagement.

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