Offshore development has been around for a long time, and it provides awesome benefits to companies across the globe. Offshore Software Development is the way of hiring software developers and engineers across different countries and regions from your location. This way, you can get access to a wider pool of developers by overcoming geographical barriers, and it allows you to build and ship awesome products faster.
Just like every other thing, there are good and bad things about offshore API development. In this article, we will explore the good and bad things about offshore API development, but before that, let’s understand what is API development.
What is API Development?
Application Programming Interfaces are defined as ways in which different clients communicate with an application and server. The APIs are used to render webpages, authenticate users, exchange data, and do many more things.
While such development can be done onshore, there are many benefits to doing it offshore. So, let’s take a look at a few benefits of offshore API development.
Benefits of Offshore API Development
Access to a Large Pool of Developers
When you work with onshore developers, you are restricted to hiring API developers who are in your region, which limits your potential candidate pool. With offshore development, you can hire from around the world without worrying about geographical restrictions. This can help you gain access to a large pool of developers to choose from. Moreover, this can also reduce your time to hire new API developers even if you are working with some niche technologies.
By accessing a global talent pool, you can also build diverse teams that bring different ways of thinking and innovation to your projects and ultimately lead to success.
Cost Savings
One of the biggest benefits of offshore API development is that it provides awesome cost savings. This is also the driving force behind the success of the offshore hiring model. Suppose you are located in a country where a Python developer charges $50 per hour, and you are ready to work with offshore software development teams. By opting for offshore developers, you can get expert developers for under $35 and save significantly in the long run.
The offshore software development rates are not limited to salaries. You can save on office costs, as the API developers aren’t located in the same region. Moreover, if you work with an offshore service provider, you can save significantly on training and employee retention costs.
Faster Time to Market
With offshore API development teams, you can build and ship products faster than in-house teams. Even when someone from the offshore team moves out, you can quickly replace them through the available options from the service provider, and this ensures that your projects don’t come to a stop.
Apart from this, the offshore development teams can work in different time zones and have some overlap with your teams. This helps you keep developing apps around the clock and accelerates product development.
Flexibility and Scalability
Requirements keep changing in software development projects, and you can benefit from this with offshore software development teams. They provide unparalleled flexibility in these scenarios, as you can change project scope and requirements without much impact on pricing and commitments.
Offshore API developers also provide scalability as they have many more team members, and you can scale your teams based on demand. When the project is undergoing peak times when more developers are required, you can easily onboard them from the offshore service provider and offboard them when the work is done. Such flexibility and scalability in hiring and running teams are big reasons for the popularity of offshore API development.
Having known about the benefits of offshore API development, there are some challenges, too, when you adopt this model. So, let’s have a look at some common challenges in offshore API development.
Challenges of Offshore API Development
Quality and Security Risks
When adopting the offshore API development model, most companies are worried about the quality and security challenges they will face. If you don’t do your due diligence and work with a substandard offshore development service provider, you can easily run into quality and security issues. This will not only give you substandard output but will also increase your costs.
So, to protect yourself from such issues, ensure you work with famous offshore service providers and have a secure enterprise environment and devices in place for working with offshore development teams.
Time Zone Difference
Time zone difference is both a benefit and a challenge, and it all depends on how you tackle this. If you have async teams, offshore API development teams will not face time zone issues. But you will need to schedule your calls and meetings and adjust your working hours to enable some overlap between onshore and offshore development teams. The time zone difference can also introduce communication gaps and longer waiting times, as the overlaps between the teams are fewer. However, this can be solved by adjusting working hours for the offshore and onshore API development teams a bit so that they can work together.
Communication Issues
Offshore API development can easily run into communication issues due to differences in time zones, cultures, and languages. If you hire offshore developers from a country where English is not prevalent, you may face communication issues. The best way to solve this is to stick to countries where English is prevalent and where there is a minimal time zone and cultural difference.
Following this will ensure that you don’t have communication issues for your offshore API development projects and everything goes smoothly.
Conclusion
Coming to an end, there are a lot more benefits of offshore API development than the ones discussed here. The benefits outperform the challenges, and this makes such a model perfect for companies that want to build global teams and save costs without compromising on the output. If you haven’t worked with an offshore API development team yet, you should definitely give it a try for your next project.
