Software development is not a commodity product. Software development requires a high degree of talent and a high degree of skill. Very few people can truly do it well, but that does not stop a large number of people who cannot do it well claiming that they can.
Quality development - meaning fast development with low defect rates - requires hiring only the best. This is because:
- An average developer can produce software 10 times as fast as the worst developers. The best software developers can produce software 10 times as fast as average developers. That means the best software developers can produce software as much as 100 times as fast as the worst developers.
- A highly talented, experienced software developer can produce software with defect rates as much as 1000 times lower than the worst inexperienced software developers, and as much as 100 times lower than average developers.
These differences mean that hiring cheap developers of low to average quality is false economy and ends up being far more expensive than hiring high quality developers, because:
- Hiring cheaper developers actually costs much more up front than hiring the best developers, because you have to hire many more of the cheaper developers to get the same job done.
- Hiring cheaper developers actually costs more later because you have to spend a lot more developer time fixing the higher number of bugs they put in.
- Hiring cheaper developers means waiting longer to get working software because of the additional build-test-fix cycles to fix the larger number of bugs.
- Hiring cheaper developers means you need more team leaders and managers because the larger teams have to be sub-divided into smaller teams for effective management. This is another cost overhead.
- As development projects grow, communication costs between those developers increase and slow down the development further. Keeping to small teams of higher quality developers reduces this overhead.
- There are some tasks a higher quality developer can do that a cheaper software developer can never do, no matter how much time they have, because higher quality developers can handle a much higher degree of complexity (and make it look simple).
- No matter how much time you give them or how many you throw at a project, cheaper sotware developers cannot produce code of the same quality as high quality software developers. You cannot expect a large number of cheaper software developers to produce a high quality result, just as you would not expect to hire 10 house painters and get them to produce the Mona Lisa. The lower quality produced by large teams of average or poor software developers inevitably leads to software that is more expensive to maintain and develop down the track.
- Hiring cheaper software developers at the start of a project leads to poorly architected projects that have designed-in flaws that can never be properly fixed (other than by starting from scratch with high quality developers).
The problem for most organisations looking for software development is that identifying who the best software developers are is a difficult task - in fact for most it is an impossible one. There are even many poor quality software developers who seek extravagant rates, so price is not necessarily an indicator.
Kawseq has the experience to reliably select only the best software developers, but in order to provide the kind of quality we are prepared to put our name to, we must personally select local, cream of the crop developers.
This means we will never pass development off to a faceless sweat-shop in a cheaper location. Aside from the fact that there is no reasonable way for us to evaluate the skills of individual developers in a foreign outsourcing organisation, outsourcing to cheaper locations has other problems.
Development will always be performed locally in Sydney (or at your site where you elect to have development performed on your premises). If you are outside Sydney and want the on-site option for a longer project, we will come to your location and personally evaluate all staff. We will not settle for second best - if we do not have spare capacity and cannot find the staff in time we will turn down the business rather than provide a second rate service.