How building development team works

The detailed technical consultation (which itself is worth thousands of dollars in value) includes things like challenges of the project, what tech-stack to use to solve those challenges. A detailed hiring plan is also part of this consultation and includes details on what skill set and experience your team need to have.

Astute's team extension service allows you to hire pre-vetted, world-class developers as part of your team. We handle all aspects of finding, vetting, and choosing the right candidates that you don't have the time, focus, desire, or sometimes expertise to do.

None! We operate under the policy that it is our responsibility to find you the right person for the job. If you don’t find the right one, you won’t spend a dime.

Finding developers and freelancers is easy — the hard part is knowing if you have found people who will truly deliver. This is specifically difficult if you don't have years of experience in vetting and choosing the best developers from a range of technologies. We do.

Remote teams, whether comprised of developers from 50 miles away from you or 5,000 miles, bring pretty extraordinary advantages. Knowledge sharing & documentation

Most of our developers work remotely and are experienced in working with distributed teams. If an on-site developer is strictly required, we can certainly work with you to make it happen. We can tap into our partner network and a vetted list of developers to help you find a local developer.

Astute's tried and tested engagement model of team extension has been refined over the last 5 years. We make sure we are not limited by the distance, time zone differences, and communication fluency that come with remote resources. If the client’s team is not used to working with remote talent, it may take some time to work out processes and learn best practices. That's why we start team integration by assigning a Technical Lead (sometimes local to the client’s location), a project manager, and a customer experience manager. Tech lead shepherds our development team to execute quality software on time. A local project manager helps you transition into remote working environment smoothly.

Customer experience managers run a continuous feedback cycle on both ends to look for whatever could go wrong. They keep an eye on 15 project success parameters that we have defined to make sure all things are running smoothly. Knowledge Transfer and Team Integration Our team works with you for a minimum of two weeks. Individual new hiree onboarding is replaced with full team onboarding from your side. Our Tech Lead and PM will work closely with the client for the first few weeks of cooperation to work out an efficient remote working model and help to set up all the agile processes necessary for a geographically distributed team. Many times our clients already have a tech team and all the processes are well defined. In that case, we do a two-week trial execution so that our team can adopt and work in a way that fits your team’s workflow.

Our team spends the time to understand your processes, who the stakeholders are, who the users are by doing sessions around user stories, code architecture (system or functional level), and most importantly business goals. Technology alignment and collaboration with your developers is critical here. We try to learn as much as possible in these two weeks. How you like to work, how the code should be structured, how tasks should be assigned, how questions should be asked, how suggestions should be given, how to do standups etc.

We make remote work We hear frequently from prospective clients that it takes forever to release new features, that users aren't adopting products, and that finished work hasn't met their expectations. The solution: Communication, lots of it. We build teams with a focus on collaboration, consistent communication, and transparency in working toward a shared goal: a great product. Constant communication ensures there are absolutely no surprise breaks in execution. We use video calls, daily stand-ups, one-on-one check-ins and (if possible) a once a year “retreat” where everyone can get some face time. Our fully integrated team is self-managed and operates autonomously Astute team integrates into your team, participating in standup and scrum meetings, weekly demos, weekly retrospectives. Daily stand-ups We do daily stand-ups where everyone gets on a video chat and tells you what they are working on that day and the previous day. When you’ve got people working for you in multiple time zones, this can be challenging.

But it is crucial to the success of your team. The Agile methodology calls for each contributor to go around, talk about what they’ve been working on, what they will be working on, estimate how long it’s going to take them, whether there are any critical blockers that could cause delay, and what their bandwidth looks like. These stand-ups are rigorously tracked by the Tech Lead. But we do not just rely on unstructured communication. Everyone at Astute uses PPP (progress, plans, problems) methodology which is used at companies like Facebook, Google, eBay, Skype etc. PPP is used to detail progress, issues, thoughts and anything else pertaining to their tasks. Weekly demonstrations This one is simple: get everybody on a video chat, share screens, have people show their work, and then talk about it. If something is exceptional, call it out and appreciate the work. So the team stays motivated. If something is buggy or substandard, ask why and figure out the solution.

This meeting is usually way longer than a stand-up as it is designed to literally “demo” the work that has been promised during stand-ups. Keep in mind that if there are any “semi-off-topic” follow-up questions then they should be saved for the later Retrospective meeting. Weekly Retrospectives A weekly retrospective is where you all collectively review what went well and what could have been improved based on the demo. We use the lean method of holding a meeting. It is great because it gives everyone a voice—there’s an element of democracy in the development process now. You’re still “the boss” but everybody now has some skin in the game. This will also help to organically create a culture within your remote team—something we will cover at length in a future post. There’s really no “one-way” to optimize and manage a remote team. Everybody has got their own style and strengths. And your team and processes will evolve as they need to in order to meet the needs of your product and to optimize the time and output of your team.

As a client, you will own all the intellectual property of all paid-for work. We provide an NDA to protect confidentiality. All our team members sign a strict contract to protect your IP.

1) Test Cases Driven User Stories for Clear Requirements - When our engagement with the client starts we help them create detailed user stories and scope out the next few sprints.

2) Intense Sprint Planning: In order to execute projects on time, you need to plan sprints as much as possible.

3) Iterative Delivery: Typically, in an agile development process, we will divide the implementation process into several checkpoints rather than a single deadline. They are called iterations and are part of each sprint.

4) Documentation: We document everything from application and code level architecture decisions, to live user stories document, to design focused UX/UI/Design System documents.

5) Constant Communication and Retrospective Stand-Up Each workday begins with a brief team stand-up meeting to discuss what we did yesterday, and what we plan to do today.

6) Code review: A successful peer review strategy for code review requires a balance between strictly documented processes and a non-threatening, collaborative environment.

7) Integrating QA in the development process: We have gotten much better about integrating QA in our development process. We used to loop QA in after our code was pushed to the master branch, which was clunky. Now our QA engineers will identify and create a test plan as soon as we begin working on the next sprint. As initial development nears completion, an engineer and a QA engineer will run through test scenarios together.

8) Post-release: It’s important to circle back and review how the process went once you’re done, be it a success or failure. Did the testing rightly model the production scenario? Did your team correctly estimate the effort required to release a product? How is the product running in production? Review how well the team performed by revisiting the implementation and testing checkpoints. Your team will adjust their performance accordingly as they grow used to being held accountable for every step in this process.

After all, we are a software company and we use technology to make collaboration work. The whole company is run through several tools, many of them proprietary, to help make fully integrated and self-managed teams operate autonomously.

All top athletes have great coaches and use comprehensive data and analytics to help tune their performance. We believe all top performers can use the same data and analytics to help them get even better.

As a result, we've developed a data-driven productivity app—for how our team works. It effortlessly collects more than 20 data points and provides analytics that enables individuals and teams to use real data on how they work to bring their performance to another level.

In alternative weekly retrospectives meetings, we discuss the developer performance dashboard. This has all the information about the overall status of your project, key milestone dates, sprint plans, productivity of developers, velocity of developers, story points worked on developers, complex tasks worked by developers etc.

We know that if client’s project launches smoothly, they’ll come back for more. We're willing to over-invest in guaranteeing results, rather than under-invest to make our financial reports look pretty in the short-run.

We offer a risk-free trial period of up to two weeks. You will only have to pay if you are happy with the development team and wish to continue.

This is a good way to ensure that the freelance developer is a good fit. If you don’t find them to be extraordinary, you will not be charged and to make sure your time isn't wasted we will assign someone to guarantee the work is done for free.

Astute maintains a variety of insurance to protect and satisfy company-level obligations for our enterprise partners.

With other platforms client’s IP and their security isn't as safe. And reliability, responsibility, and long term commitment of freelancers are questionable.