
Ask HN: Advice on finding, selecting, and hiring contracted dev team - matt_the_bass
Hi all,<p>My company has a small in-house software dev team that (imho) works well, produces quality code and moves quickly. We are currently considering to roughly double our work load for ~9 months in order to ship a large feature set quickly. This obviously requires a larger dev team. Due to the temporary nature of the ramp up, we’re considering if using contractors might be a viable option.<p>No-one on our team has worked with or worked as contractors. Therefore, we’re a little nervous if this plan is a good idea.<p>Does anyone have any advice on working with a contracted dev team? I.e:
- how to find such a team?
- how to evaluate a team before hiring them?
- best practices for working with a 1&#x2F;2 in house 1&#x2F;2 contracted team
- for deliverables, do you want to receive the entire dev commit history or just the final HEAD of the code?
- any caveats about our potential plan? Is it a bad idea? We’d rather it do the project if we can’t do it well.<p>Thanks in advance.
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PaulHoule
You want the contracted dev team working on a VCS server you control from day
one; there must be some deliverable that they ship to you by 3 months for
acceptance testing. Ideally the work should be broken up into some kind of
"sprint" structure in that changes are merged early and often so the risk is
not "we worked for 9 months and got nothing", but more "we worked for 9 months
and got 75% of what we want".

I'd be glad to chat more.

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matt_the_bass
Thanks for your reply.

I like your comment of trying to mitigate risk to 75% vs 0%. I think it makes
sense to expect only partial sucess (at least for the first time working with
a contractor).

