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. Read more…
I have noticed on a few developer forums like this one that there are a decent amount of people who are looking for guidance as to how best execute their ideas. Most often these “idea people” are berated by the hardcore developers in the forums, written off as little more than a symptom of the iPhone app store hype. While no doubt there are a decent amount of Trism or iShoot wannabes who give the rest of us a bad name, I am writing this post for those of you who think you have something good and are actually serious about getting your product developed and following through. While I am still working on my 1st app, and have no idea how it will do in the App Store, I can tell you that I sat on my idea for a good 6 months so I have a pretty good idea of how hard it is to get started and where the pitfalls are.
Read more…
When I started working with the development team abroad, they suggested we use Basecamp to stay in synch. I had heard of the company 37 Signals but had never used any of their products so I was really blown away once we got the project up an running. The service includes a message board, shared task calendar, To Do List, a writeboard, and file sharing service and an easily to manage contacts list.
Basecamp screenshot
The team put all of our milestones into the system so now I can go to Basecamp, review the list of upcoming milestones and leave files and comments that I think are useful for the team. Once you upload or insert a new comment you have the option of notifying specific group members which is great because it avoids spamming those people who are not relevant to the update.
I think this software is really a brilliant way to manage a geographically separated group of people where transparency can obviously be difficult and it is hard to get clarity around what each person is doing. I seriously recommend Basecamp for anyone collaborating on not just software development, but anything that could require getting a group of people on to the same page.
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