We recommend that you prepare before starting looking a software development company. What do we mean? First, you should create some description of a software system (SRS), where you describe your expectations, goals, functionality, and the budget limitations. It will be faster and more cost-effective to integrate external development team from day one. As a result, you will structure all the important information about your aim and the project needs. Thus, the development team will more accurately realize your idea.

Who is this checklist for?

• For product/business owners.
• For existing businesses that need to upgrade or modernize the software.

Checklist for describing your project for the development company

1. What are the project goal and target?

At this point, everything seems to be simple, but at the same time, it is difficult. You should inform the developers about the global aim, its value for the target audience and what you want, as a customer, to come. Why is it necessary for the developers? It will help them to be most useful to you and create a really desirable software that can solve the end user’s problems.

2. What is the current state of your project?

Write about the current state of the project. Describe the existing system components and the technologies used to create them. What goals your software archives already? Is it demo-ready or in the middle of the development? It will also be useful to learn about the non-technical part.

3. What is the scope of your project?

Tell about your target customer and your niches. What is his age, sex, family status, interests, etc? Have you already had a history of little success about the interaction with your clients? Tell or write about it in details.

4. What’s functionality do you want to receive as a result?

Describe your future software and maybe the technologies used to create it. For example, you have a factory that manufactures some product. And you need to account for the products and sales. Describe in details all the business processes and how the software should work. Probably, in the final version everything will function differently, but for the developers, your work will give a more demonstrative description of your needs.

5. What are the estimates or the release date?

Specify the release date, if any. If there is no defined deadline the development might take much longer than it should so we highly recommend to schedule the release.

6. Do you have the project team?

If you already have a project manager or the developers that will also work on this project, describe shortly their role and involvement.

7. What are the key project constraints?

It may be budget, time, specific quality requirements. Rank them in order according the most important limitations. It will help to determine the project’s scope and recommend the best work approach.

Conclusions:

Your qualitative preparation for the first meeting will greatly simplify your further cooperation with the potential development company partners. Create a clear description of your project, its functionality and maybe even technology. It will be great if you make the presentation in PDF, Word or other text files. Send it before a call, so that to save your time. Some companies may not be able to perform your request or they are not specializing in such project tasks.