Jackitithera

The delivery process matters more than team size. Find out how a new requirement enters the plan, who writes the acceptance criteria and what the QA setup looks like.

Hiring in-house buys you the most control. The engineers absorb your domain over time, and that knowledge stays in the building.

Say what the word done means for the important items. Clear acceptance criteria do not require any formal notation: a short list setting out what must be true when the feature works will do.

Set out the scope as user stories or scenarios: who does what, and what happens next. Equally important, write down what the first release deliberately excludes.

The paperwork needs a slower read than the pitch. Three clauses do most of the work: ownership of the code, non-disclosure, and termination and handover.

Handing a project to a vendor is the arrangement where someone else is accountable for shipping: the partner staffs the team, the partner manages the day-to-day work, and they carry the delivery risk.

Before signing, plan for the handover before it becomes urgent. Require that the source repository stays under your account from the beginning, and that documentation is written as you go rather than left to the end.

Write down the hard constraints. These include the platforms and services involved, the data you have and where it lives, regulatory obligations, user volumes, target platforms and any technology you are committed to.