Numerous research reports and analyses have been devoted to the benefits and challenges of using virtual software development teams. The most significant and indisputable benefit of the distributed-development model is the ability to staff your team with the talent of the highest caliber at a much lower price than an on-site team. This is actually the main reason why millions of startups, small companies, midsize businesses  and global tech companies have remote workers within their teams. Additional advantages of virtual teams include a 24-hour development cycle, an increase in productivity and a shorter time-to-market.

While some experts in global software development share their success stories, their opponents complain that the quality of software developed  by a distributed team often suffers from time lags, language and cultural differences, lack of control, and communication problems. The negative impact of the distributed-development model on software quality is one of the most widely spread beliefs in software project management so far. Microsoft’s ESM group (Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement Research Group) members were concerned about the issue and recently decided to run their own study.

In their empirical study, they looked for statistical evidence that components developed by distributed teams resulted in software with more errors than components developed by collocated teams. Guess what? Christian Bird, University of California, Davis; Nagappan Premkumar Devanbu, University of California, Davis; Harald Gall, University of Zurich, and Murphy found that the differences were statistically negligible!

The study measured diverse component characteristics, such as code churn, complexity, dependency information and test code coverage. “Teams that were distributed wrote code that had virtually the same number of post-release failures as those that were collocated,” the report says.

Moreover, the ESM group wanted to verify the results and conducted an anonymous survey, asking engineers if they ran into problems. Most people preferred to talk to someone from their own organization 4,000 miles away, rather than someone only five doors down the hall but from a different organization. Organizational cohesiveness played a bigger role than geographical distance. In other words, if your local and remote team members work in the same management environment and have access to the same resources, you will most likely reap the benefits of your virtual team, rather than face the negative side. That’s why, at Murano, we were always big believers in the dedicated team model where an offshore provider manages administrative and logistical issues while the offshore team becomes a cohesive part of the client’s engineering organization.

Some respected Internet sources give very cognitive information and can influence thinking. One source displays a diagram that shows offshore software development destinations. You can find several countries there, but Russia is not represented. Where is it included? Is it located in the “Eastern Europe” or “Other Countries” category? 

On the other hand, more and more large companies open development centers in Russia. This week Google opened its second development center outside the US in the same country. The country is Russia and the development center is located in Saint-Petersburg.  
 
Google chose Russian specialists to develop innovative software solutions. Murano clients do the same. If you are looking to set up your own offshore development center in Russia, we would like you to consider working with our dedicated teams of talented and highly skilled technical professionals.  
 

It’s obvious that lots of companies can minimize their development costs via offshore outsourcing. Thus usually one of the main criteria for choosing an offshore destination is price. Don’t you think this is a mistake?

If you seek a successful offshore outsourcing engagement, you must think of the results you want. You should pick a vendor that matches you in size or the size of your projects. It’s worth paying attention to developers’ abilities, skills and experience; put emphasis on people rather than on specific requirements of your project.

As for Murano Software, we are quite effective at cooperating with small and mid-size companies that are innovative. We provide our clients with dedicated teams of talented and creative problem solvers who are able to realize the client’s ideas successfully.

In our opinion, the best offshore effect occurs when the finished software product delivers the full functionality required to meet the needs of the client and it is delivered on time and on budget without any unexpected changes in the process of the development.
To get the desired offshore effect, you should enhance your in-house IT-team by engaging the top specialists in the world. Therefore ask for resumes, don’t be immediately concerned with how quickly a project can get done. Ask for company hiring policies and strategy. And finally, you’ll benefit from having access to a diverse talent pool that can quickly fulfill your requirements and deliver the quality software products and achieve better ROI.

One of the initial questions raised, when thinking of offshore outsourcing software development is how to maintain communication. Productivity in software development is measured by meeting customer needs, thus communication is all-important in providing time-to-market, cost-effectiveness and fulfilling other requirements. So when you select your offshore partner make sure that they have their headquarters or, at least, an office in your country.

We, at the Murano US office, not only discuss development needs before contracting, we also encourage feedback (both positive and negative) from our clients. This allows us to adopt our processes, react to issues quickly and replicate successes.