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Finding a Ready-Made Dev Team?
marshrew writes "We are a small startup just coming out of a period of R&D with IP and prototype code (containing open source, commercial & freelancer-built custom components) developed/integrated in-house by essentially one guy. We're at the point where we want to build out first commercial implementation which will require a handful of developers for at least six months. We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc. What we'd really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with. We don't mean a splinter group from a larger dev house, but an agile, self-contained team, who enjoy working together and have an existing practice. Geography is not a problem as we are used to working in a distributed manner." Does such an animal exist? What have other teams done in a situation like this?
That's who we used in 2001 when we needed a huge web-based Java system done. They brought in nine programmers with a top-notch project manager. It cost a lot, but it cost less than not doing it.
Try www.rentacoder.com , or other such sites. Although most people on the site are private individuals, there are some organizations with dozens of programmers, that can be hired for any period of time or to accomplish any set goal. Plus there is the benefit of user feedback from others who have hired the same team in the past. You can browse the list of teams with the highest user feedback, and invite them to bid on your project.
Sourceforge? www.sourceforge.net
These were some guys who worked with my company in Massachussetts. They're pretty Java-focussed, I think, but they're good. They formed their group to do exactly what you're asking for. They were composed of three or four guys at the time.
http://team345.com/
I had one such practice a few years back. However, in 2001-2003 there were fewer people looking for this kind of service. People were generally unwilling to take risks, and nothing much was happening in terms of application development. Atleast nothing like whats happening now, or back in '99.
Although many websites (like rentacoder.com) offer this functionality, it is difficult to guarantee the quality of people you will end up working with. The surprising limitation of these sites is that they have no mechanism to ensure quality of bidders or participants. Which is exactly why Arzoo.com (by the hotmail founder) failed. Bad quality. Add to that, people simply trying to outbid others. I have even seen $100 for a 1 month job!!! If you go to such sites, you are very likely to lose some time trying to filter out the not-so-good ones.
Since you will be working with people you know little about, there are however things that you could do, before making your final decision.
1. See if they have blogs. Look at their attitude, language, code quality, passion, whatever...
2. Talk to them. Check for conversational skills. These are very important!
3. See if they have done any open source work. (That will be a real bonus!)
4. Ask them to send source code.
I feel such a practice certainly has a place in modern IT. Agile, Quality-Concious and Inexpensive.
Things are looking up again, and thats good news.
Good luck to you.
Life is just a conviction.