I came across many cases of bad practices involving outsourced development teams recently. They vary from lack of skills to outright fraud. Damages ranged from a few thousand dollars wasted on misunderstood business requirements to millions of dollars siphoned through fake organizations.
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The geography of “bad” developers often includes India, Eastern Europe and increasingly Russia. My American and European colleagues are somewhat protected from the Russian fraudsters by the recent sanctions. The other countries are “The Wild West” of these “coder-criminals”, especially the GCC and some parts of East Asia.
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How do they do it? They offer you everything you want to hear from a development team: “we will create your website/app fast”, “free rework”, “up to the top standards” and the most commonly: “we are very cheap”. They also use the common myths such as, “Indians are superior in computer sciences” or “Russians are the best programmers” etc. No need to argue about these myths here, because you can compare a number of successful digital enterprises in India or Russia, against, say, the United States, and it will become clear where the most successful electronic and computer businesses live. In short, the most important part of the development vendor is not the experience of a few team members. The most important factor for you as a buyer, is their integrity, reliability and teamwork.
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How do you defend yourself from bad coders and coder-fraud?
Follow these simple steps:
1. Never ever prepay any amount to developers. If they don’t even have enough money to cover the first month of work that’s a red flag. If they request a deposit, use an independent escrow service, that only allows withdrawal upon contract completion.
2. Let at least 10 users, friends or family test the product before you accept it.
3. Make the developers sign detailed contracts with failure-to-perform clauses, and especially non-disclosure agreements.
4. Remember that the product is yours ONLY when no one else has access to it anymore. Delete developer users and change admin passwords after they are done developing.
5. Dictate the payment terms no less than net 10 (10 days after completion).
6. Use your own git services for all projects.
7. Do not disclose sensitive information to the developers if possible, use dummy data.
8. Do not share intellectual property, like patents or business ideas with developers from another country. You won’t be able to get them, if they steal your idea and publish the app for themselves.
9. Request to view their prior projects and talk to a couple of prior customers of your choice. If they refuse, walk away.
10. Collect copies of identity papers with photos of key contacts along with their current personal contact information, education credentials and resumes. Verify that all the information is true. Use background investigation companies to check their backgrounds.
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As always you may get more help from our specialists at www.romanconsulting.io