Sometimes you know exactly what you want your software to do. You can easily hire an offshore programming team or a freelancer if you have a small project, and direct them to develop what you need. 

Other times, you may not be so sure. You need someone to research what is best,or even possible, before software development can begin. Outsourcing of your research before you begin development takes a special type of engineering team. 

Woe to the company that outsources to one type of offshore team when they need the other! 

I have a couple of clients right now that are in “research-mode” as they use offshore outsourcing to create a software product. One requires some innovative software to run under Windows that communicates with a website. The other needs an efficient screen capture solution also running on Windows. 

In both cases, the desired software functionality can be described in a paragraph or two. But that brief description is just the tip of the iceberg. 

In both cases, there are three or more approaches that need to be compared and evaluated for practicality, performance and ease of installation. 

Now imagine hiring an offshore vendor with programmers who are waiting for an exact and detailed specification. And all you provide is a two paragraph description. 

Clearly, that is not going to work. You need an experienced software architector designer to play around with the various approaches and then identify the pros and cons. The research they do is an interactive and collaborative effort with you. 

The holy grail of outsourcing your research is to find a vendor with deep experience in the technology you want to use. 

For example, I worked for a company that found a small contract programming firm with a software application they had already developed for one of their clients. They retained rights to the software and were able to offer it to us as the basis of our first product. It was an exact fit for what we needed. 

But that’s not always possible. More likely you will find a firm that has experienced senior people with some knowledge of your target technology. 

Unless your vendor is going to provide these senior people, you will be wasting your time trying to get advanced work out of a junior team.