How to manage code quality while outsourcing your projects on platforms like Upwork!
How to manage code quality while outsourcing your projects on platforms like Upwork
If you’re reading this article, then you’re either getting a product build or planning for one. Although outsourcing software development is highly evolved, the basic requirements remained the same. These are building a product fast, high in quality, and low in cost. While outsourcing, code quality has become the most vital factor for the success of the project.
While outsourcing to Upwork or Fiverr can help bring down the costs while keeping things fast-paced and high on quality. Sometimes it becomes challenging to achieve these three basic requirements together.
Major concerns that founders face while outsourcing development projects.
Slower turnaround time
You expect that whoever you hire will complete the task and return the finished product as quickly as possible. It should be done without any delays beyond the original estimated timeframe for completion. There could be several reasons for slower turnaround time.
- Workflow is undocumented and not transparent.
- Processes are manual and require a great deal of human intervention.
- Communication during the process is lacking.
Any of these reasons can lead to poor outcomes to various operational and financial resources.
Transparency in project status
Regardless of a project’s type or size, lack of transparency can create problems such as – missing project data, project financial ambiguity, code review, etc.
In large technical projects where the trend involves multiple entities in delivering the project, there is a tremendous amount of data that gets exchanged. The level of detail, quality, and speed of this communication could have a drastic impact on project success.
Code quality monitoring
Have you wondered why it is crucial that your team needs to be certified and comply with international coding regulations? Well, many outsourcing issues stem from the failure to deal with code quality. A buggy code or code with high coupling and low cohesion is challenging maintenance.
Poor code quality is a preamble term for multiple issues with the codebase:
- Code that exhibits buggy behavior
- Longer run time
- Messy code/spaghetti code with high coupling and low cohesion
- Unmaintainable code
- Usage of obsolete libraries/frameworks
- Code repetition that leads to costly refactoring
If left unchecked, poor code quality can lead to issues during delivery. It can bring development to a halt. It can lead to long periods of refactoring or a complete rewrite if the root causes are not addressed.
Must Read: Code Review: The Secret of Code Improvement
What are the methods that can be used to monitor project quality?
To reduce the turnaround time, KPIs around quality will play a crucial role to minimize rework and failure rates. Whereas, to maintain transparency and high code quality, there are three key actions to monitor throughout a project’s lifecycle.
- Regular code review to make sure every member is keeping up with the applied practices.
- Continuously scan source code (by using static code analysis tools) to find coding issues.
- Encourage unit tests and monitor the test coverage.
How to mitigate these concerns?
The best way would be to include code review as a mode of reporting project status. As It is a lightweight process, it could be applied as soon as the code is written on any software project. Mostly, the compiler catches issues and lists out a stack trace. But there might be some errors that it cannot catch, such as bad code structure, coding practice, and test coverage.
The only way to catch such mistakes is to have an automated code review of your source code. Then you can set the outsourcing company’s benchmarks for every report. Luckily, many tools can help you control code quality, analyze the quality, and build useful reports. Here is an article that will help you automate code review processes.
Codegrip is one such platform. Used by 500+ companies, CodeGrip helps developers to manage source code quality. Codegrip currently supports over 20 languages which include Java, Angular, PHP, HTML, CSS, Python, Kotlin, etc. You can understand How exactly automated code reviews work.
Now you can get started with automating your code review process.
Sign Up with Codegrip and get started for Free!
Codegrip uses a robust AI-based database to collect and analyze source code for bugs, bad code, and code-style errors. It examines and evaluates different aspects of your source code from minor styling details, potential bugs, and code defects. It also checks for critical design errors, lack of test coverage, and excess complexity.
In the end, Codegrip produces metric values and statistics, revealing problematic areas in the source that require inspection or improvement. On average, our customers save a projected 30-50K USD/year that could have been incurred due to bad code and rework. Add to it the possibility of failed products or lawsuits, and the benefits become priceless.
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