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Below is some advice from Taras Filatov, the lead of the team I am currently working with in the Ukraine.  His advice is great if you are thinking about developing an application and are currently looking for developers (either locally or abroad):

1.  “I need a simple iPhone app done…”

A lot of iPhone job posts at Odesk, Elance, RentACoder start like this.  This is somewhat similar to the typical “I need a simple shopping cart solution” post we often see in the web development section.  It might be interesting for you to know that when your ad starts like this there is a very high chance that it will be disregarded by developers or their sales teams that check the website.  This is because developers in most cases find the requirements for something stated to be simple as oftentimes being actually very complex software: with bells and whistles, using GPS location, chat, camera, social networking functionality and a website to support the server functionality.  All of this is just assumed to appear out of the blue built by the same developer.

Typically, there are no specification documents and the job poster has a general, unfinished idea of  what he/ she thinks is a “killer app” and they want the developer to do the rest of thinking. It is also common in such cases that the author did little or no research into what is possible with iPhone SDK and after a discussion it may well turn out that implementing such functionality is impossible at all (except for jailbroken devices) so it turns out to have been a waste of time to even sign all the confidential agreements and begin discussion at the end of the day.

So in such case one may understand the frustration of a developer reading such posts. Therefore, a bit of advice here – while it is good to let developers know that you are not a dollar printing machine and you value your money and know what is difficult and what’s not, it is better to demonstrate this by having a professional approach in making your job specifications properly.

So to summarize the most important steps are:

1. Think your idea over.
2. Do some market research.
3. Write the specs. Create mock-ups and use cases where applicable.(you may find useful our guide on writing use cases and also an Adobe Photoshop PSD file for making iPhone interface mockups)

2. Post broadly

There are a lot of great developers who just stick to one website such as Elance or Guru.com. So if you post to Craigslist or Odesk only, you might lose a chance to find the best coder/ company just because they won’t see your message. Some developers check these desks themselves, some have special sales people. Sales people are often working as a freelance force finding projects for multiple groups of developers – taking a percentage of the contract price in exchange. So in some casing posting broadly means you have a better chance to reach your developer directly and therefore save some money.

Pick those who you think might be eligible and do a better selection process on them.  Check their portfolios, talk to them, ask if they’ve done something
similar. Find out from the communication what’s their English level, what are the times they are available online, if they are responsible people. Might be a good idea to Google them.

4. Ask for a development plan

After you have your professional looking outlined specs, you have a right to expect the same courtesy from developers.  It is the developer’s responsibility to study your specs, think the technical details over and create the development plan which may include hourly breakdown for each task or, alternatively, your project might be broken down into milestones describing features to be implemented with each iteration of the development. Such plan is a must to be able to track project development progress and it can also be a convenient way to organize payments upon successful completion of each milestone.

Injoit.com

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