Top 10 Tools to Monitor Web Developers Progress on Outsourced Projects
You need to monitor the progress of your outsourced project on a regular basis to avoid delay in delivery, hasty delivery, and incomplete documentation. You must monitor the web developers to get the best. The first tool is your contract. In the contract itself, you must ensure that the developer will give you a progress report. It can be on daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. The deciding factor is the size and the complexity of your project, and there will be a meeting on a regular basis between the developers and your team where you can discuss and view the outcome of the project, and it is a must so make sure the tools are in place.
The advantage of outsourcing
The advantage of outsourcing the project is to take the help of a team of professionals who are in this field for a long time. You need to get it done by professionals, and it is very costly to get a team of first rated professional to do the project. Therefore, outsourcing is the best way, and offshore web development is a very cost effective method. But, there are a few things you must take into account; one of them being experience and quality of the developer and testimonials that can be checked independently; the time estimate and the method of arranging a meeting on regular basis. It is always possible that the developers and your time zones have a ten to twelve hour gap.
Monitoring the development progress
The problem of monitoring a web development is many, especially when you are shores apart. Monitoring the web development progress can be a real issue. There are a few tools available, but those are difficult to customize and especially from remote locations. Besides, the developer will not be interested in sharing the source code even if you have an agreement with them especially at the development stage. The GitHub is a powerful resource and an open sourced one but, it will give you the freedom to manipulate the source code. Tinkering with the source code willingly or by accident can change the program code entirely and the developer may need hours to correct it. However, another freeware WordPress can do the trick, but it needs a bit of work from the developers end to make it practical.
Ways to monitor
The question remains how to monitor the progress of your job entrusted to the developer. You need a monitoring tool. The best way is to ask your developer to customize a tool with any freeware and give you access to their server where the program will be loaded. Ask them if they are finicky about giving the access to their server to load the program to a dedicated server at your end through remote access. If the entire program files can be backed up, then you can test the parameters at your end; in the case of accidental deletion or modification of a particular program, you can restore the original files from backup option and continue testing it and get the feedback on the functionality of the program. It will make you meeting with the developer more meaningful.
The top tools
You need proper tools to make your web development perfect. Fortunately, there are a few very useful project management tools. Those are
- One such excellent tool for project management is Tuleap Open ALM, it is an open sourced platform and very popular
- Odoo is another such ERP solution. It is multi-platform and open sourced
- MyCollab is another such tool The community edition of MyCollab project is freeware
- OrangeScrum is a boon to freelancers. It has a very active community, it?s a freeware and have very active community
- Taiga is another open sourced platform and is now at beta stage
- Redmine is loved by the developers and has a steady following
- OpenProject has successfully migrated to Ruby on Rails and is going strong
- Agilefant has launched a paid version, but still carrying on with the open source platform also
- ProjectLibre is also a favorite tool and has long passed the million download earmarks
- LibrePlan the current version is old and expected to release an upgrade version
The final call
It is required to monitor the progress of a development project. It needs tools to monitor web development progress. And there are plenty, but if you want to monitor the project at the development stage, you need to have basic computer literacy to do it effectively. You must know the outside boundary you can go while testing project at the development stage.
