In Offshore Development, you don't have direct contacts (face to face) with the clients. So the contact with the client must be made through internet e.g. E-mail, chatting etc. In offshore software development, first of all you need to organize everything that is required for the project.
Your first step is to collect the information from the client, such as what is the purpose of the offshore project that he needs to get developed, ask him to provide you vital statistics of the project. Also get the details of the system that already exists and need to make changes in that. If yes, then concentrate on the drawbacks of the old version so that you can overcome those and provide better solution to them.
Understand the requirement properly, have discussion on that. Create a list of software and hardware that will be required for the offshore project under development at your end. As an offshore developer, you must have to take care about the time required for the development of the offshore project.
Support
As your client and you as an offshore developer, are at different places, you need to make sure that you provide all the support required for the offshore project that you have developed. Sometimes you may need to provide him online support. It is your sole responsibility to do that. It will be very appreciable by the client, if you stay in contact with him for the technical support for at least 6 months.
Documentation
Documentation is the most important thing in offshore project development. You will need to provide your client with all the documentation of the offshore project you have developed. Documentation may contain the following:
1. Requirement Analysis.
- Need for System
- Resources
- Hardware, Software requirement,
2. System Design :
- Databases management,
- Entity Relation ship diagrams (Entity Relationship Diagrams),
- Data flow diagrams (Data Flow Diagrams)
- Advantages and Disadvantages of the software
- Pictorial representation of the project.
3. Existence of the old system and its limitation.
4. Proposed system.
5. Software Testing Report
6. Help System of the project
7. User Guides in PDF format.
Maintenance
Maintenance of the software plays the most important part in offshore software development. Once the software is developed, it needs maintenance till the people who are using it are well experienced. There will be a possibility that some bugs will come up after the software has been installed on the user's machine and you will have to fix the bugs. It means you will be needed to solve the problems that may occur. This can be done by providing the client a maintenance support for one year that will be called "Warranty Period". During this time you will have to provide the technical support.
After the Warranty period is over, you may have to make agreements for the maintenance of the offshore software developed. This will be the Annual Maintenance Contract, which will get renewed every year, if the client needs you to help on the offshore project that you have developed for him.
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