The market demand for software development teams is growing considerably. With the shortage of supply and ever-growing demand, clients look towards outsourcing to try and reduce the cost of their projects. The balance between quality and cost is important, however, when it comes to hiring third party developers, it seems the cost is the driving force behind the final decision.

The perils of price over quality

There are many possible negative consequences of hiring cheap developers. First of all, of course, is the quality of the code. Oftentimes the company that chooses the cheapest developer pays for the code twice: for the code and for the quality assessment and fixing of the code. This happens more often than one would expect, and not only in small companies.

One of the recent and tragic examples of choosing price over quality (and quality testing) of software is the Boeing’s 737 Max recall. Just a year prior to the several fatal 737 Max crashes, Boeing fired many experienced developers and hired third-party, 9$/hr developers. This leads to sub-par quality testing, which leads to avoidable mistakes in the code and several tragedies.

Good, Fast, Cheap: you can only pick two

What’s the difference?

For starters, experienced developers tend to write code that is as simple and as usable as possible. These standard patterns they use are what makes their code both much higher quality and reduces its general complexity. Such experienced developers write fewer lines of code, which prevents code conflicts and various bugs. This allows other developers to understand and work on this code easier, in case the client ever needs to change suppliers or add to the code in any other way.

Inexperienced developers, on the other hand, only know the basic skills required that are suitable for ordinary tasks. Their knowledge of libraries or advanced tools is nearly nonexistent. Instead of trying to solve the issue through in-depth knowledge, they try to apply common solutions to those problems. This code is incredibly difficult to test and most of the time requires constant maintenance or a total rewrite.

How should you avoid this?

Lately, clients looking for third-party development work (especially after such disasters as the 737 Max Recall) tend to provide trial tasks to the tender candidates. However, such tests can be easily cheated, even by outsourcing someone to do it for them, letting the low-quality developers move further in your tender.

Another way to keep this in check, at least in part, is by hiring another third-party: the QA team. Sadly, this means another tender, more contracts, etc. Besides that, having a single third party company work on a project can get overwhelming; imagine working with two different ones at the same time.

It might seem that avoiding low-quality development work might be close to impossible, but it is far from the truth. Asking the competitors of the tender to provide recommendations, the aforementioned trial tests (if you have your own QA) are options. If you really don’t have the time, you can always approach a network of IT companies, where every supplier is carefully vetted before admission.