Question
Good afternoon! For our startup, we would like to hire external IT professionals to take care of some of the coding and testing workload. We were wondering if it makes sense to hire professionals from countries where equal services are offered for a lower price than in Europe. India, China and other Asian countries come to mind.
My question is, does anybody have experience with this? Are there strategies how we can outsource some of the workload without compromising our IP protection?
Answers: 2 public & 0 private
We have used outsourced developers to supplement our main development team for various projects over the years.
It's important that your interview process is rigorous with real-world problem solving conducted over a number of hours.
Secondly, you should use a verified third-party automated time keeping system if you are paying per hour. This ensures that you pay for the time that is worked, and there is a reasonable degree of trust maintained (see e.g. WiseTime: https://headwise.systems/product#wisetime).
You should ensure that you take proper measures to protect your IP:
i) ensure that any IP generated is assigned to your company in the contract
ii) modularise your code, and only allow contractors to work on at most n-1 modules (so that no external contractors have all of the source code that enables the product to function)
iii) use automated code quality tools such as findbugs, checkstyle, PMD, minimum test coverage, and reject commits that do not meet the standards specified, by using a CI server such as Bamboo or Jenkins
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