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Software Development Teams: Build vs. Contract

By In Technology

Almost every business is technology-enabled in some way these days. Hair salons do their scheduling online, powerline workers train in VR, and pharmacists use AI systems to check for contraindications. There are very few businesses out there that could not be made more efficient and profitable — or provide better services for their customers — through technology.

In most situations, buying software and customizing it makes the best sense. You need a word processor and an accounting system, but it would show boldness to the point of lunacy to build one yourself. Quickbooks and Microsoft Word are worth the few hundred dollars a year. They might not be perfect, but the cost to build and maintain your dream accounting software could run into the millions.

However, in many situations, businesses invent new ways to improve their internal operations or their customer experience. While a comparable off-the-shelf solutions may exist to fit those needs, a custom built product is likely the only way to deliver the required features and processes the company is looking for. Features like these become competitive advantages. Organizations want to own the intellectual property behind their competitive advantages. You don’t want to license these types of systems if your competitors can license them just as easily.

That leaves companies with one choice: Build your own custom software. But the question is whether you should try and build your business-changing application in-house or outsource it to a development agency.

Cost vs. Time

Most decisions in the professional space come down to the project management triangle. If you want to build software of any decent quality, you can pick two of the three corners to move: cost, time, and scope (the number and robustness of features the project has). If you want fast and cheap, you have to shrink the scope. If you want robust and cheap, you’ll have to wait a long time.

The decision to hire an agency or build a team hinges on these three corners. In business applications, scope is usually the non-negotiable — the requirements are the requirements. Building a team takes a lot of time and costs money. Hiring an agency will drastically reduce the ramp up time by comparison, but potentially cost more. If you are worried about quality, remember that you get what you pay for.

Management Structure

Deciding to build out your own development team is not for the faint of heart, but it can have serious benefits.

To build a basic, but healthy and functioning, software team you will need the following:

  • A CTO or CIO to handle strategy and management.
  • A Director of Engineering to manage the team, build out processes, etc.
  • A Software Architect to design the system. (This can be a senior developer for small teams.)
  • A couple of DevOps engineers to manage the environments.
  • At least one QA expert. (No, developers can’t check the work themselves, I’ve tried.)
  • Developers, including full-stack, frontend, and backend developers if you’re building out a product. A good mix of senior, mid-level, and junior developers would be my recommendation to make the team robust.
  • A product owner. Preferably someone with management experience
  • A scrum master (if you’re following Scrum/Agile).
  • UX expert. I cannot understate this role enough! (They can be outsourced if you have to, but are much better to have on the team.)
  • A visual designer. Depending on the product you are building, this is the one optional role.

This is the biggest reason to hire an agency. If you want something built well, you really need a team that looks like something similar to this. Depending on your budget and experience, it could take years to put a team like this together.

However, if you have highly technical and experienced upper management there are benefits to in-house teams.

But We Are a Lean Startup

That’s great! Then you don’t need any of the stuff I listed above. But if you are purely a technology startup, then you (I’m guessing you’re a founder), need to be building the tech yourself, or at least have a co-founder building the tech. As the company scales, you can bring on additional help and you will almost certainly start looking like the organize above.

How Long Does It Take To Build a Team?

It depends on if you’re talking about a good team, or just any team. Building an organization from scratch takes time. You need to recruit, hire people, onboard them, manage them, weed out the good, let go of the bad, hire replacements for those let go, etc. You also need to invent, document, and enforce the systems and processes that will lead to the best outcomes. You will need to build a culture of caring, accountability, and quality. So, basically it will take a long, long time. This is a lot easier to do if you have a top rated CTO or a Director of Engineering in place already. Someone who has gone through this process before will be able to get you up and running much more quickly. They will also be able to oversee all stages of the team building from recruiting to delivery.

Recuiting may be the hardest piece of all of this. Good developers don’t want to join companies without histories of good development practices. So if you don’t have someone for new hires to look up to, you’re going to be stuck with coders who are just looking for a job, and they don’t write good code.

In-House vs Outsourced — Conclusion

Unless you are going to go with the lowest bidder, there probably isn’t that much difference between a good internal team and a good agency. Well-run development studios partner closely with their clients and eventually start to act as part of the same company. The developers in agencies like this feel as much ownership in what they are building as full-time employees would — sometimes more.

Price is not going to be dissimilar either. Once you count things like benefits, office space, management scaffolding, training, hardware and software tools, payroll, HR, etc., etc., etc., it’s unlikely that in-house could be done cheaper than even the large agencies.

The real difference comes down to the level of control you want over the team and the type of product you’re building. If you are a small technology startup you would be crazy to hire a big agency unless your product needed to be really good from day one. If you plan on becoming a technology company, you might want try a hybrid of agency and in-house. Finally, if you are a small- to medium-sized company whose existing products or services are not predominantly tech-focused or delivered, I would suggest not doing development in-house.

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I help cruise lines turn their technical ideas into reality. I'm experienced in all stages of innovation and technology management. I've also been programing since I was 8 years old, and have somehow retained the ability to have normal human interactions. Occasionally I speak about how Industrial Psychology and Neurophysiology can be interrogated with IT and systems management, because I spend a lot of time thinking about the subject, as strange as that may seem.

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Capture The Flag Games in Role-Playing Games

In Technology

I’ve recently been running a 5e-based game with my usual role-playing nerd circle on Sunday nights. The game is called The Spy Game. It started off as a Kickstarter campaign and doubled it’s original funding goal (well done!) It’s been fairly successful, but I’m not here to talk about that. This post is about how I’ve incorporated Capture the Flag elements to our role playing.

Yes, I’m a grown man who plays D&D-style games. We play D20 games, which are role-playing games that use dice to determine the outcomes of certain actions. They have become increasingly popularized in the media, with Stranger Things being a large contributor. I did not grow up playing D&D, but started playing when my poker group decided to mix it up. Yes that is true.

What is The Spy Game?

The Spy Game is a role-playing game that is built around telling stories set in a today-like world with… spies. That means your players pick what type of spy they want to play, and make up back stories, choose classes (Infiltrator, Assassin, Medic, etc.) Then the Game Master (me) makes up scenarios and missions for them to go on. The players decide what they want to do (e.g. attack a security guard) and they roll a die to see how devastating their attack on the poor guard was. And while this is a gross over-simplification, it’s good enough for our purposes.

Quickly, What is Capture the Flag?

Capture the flag (commonly CFP), is a style of network and systems security penetration-testing simulation for fun. The idea is that a security expert creates a small, simulated computer system that players try to break into, or crack a code to find a “flag”. The flag is the indicator of the player’s success. For example, you might be given a website that has some sort of password protection that is beatable with certain techniques. Once you bypass the security, you discovery a flag. These are often written as {Flag-name} or something similar to allow the players to know they have been successful. You can read all about them on Wikipedia, or play there with Hacker101 or even Google.

Combining CTFs and Role Playing

My roleplaying group is fairly nerdy (does that go without saying?) So I wanted to make the game a little technical and different from our usual swords and sorcery chaos romps. I thought it would be interesting for those in the group who are less technically minded to learn a little about actual hacking, rather than the “roll the dice to try and hack the system” that is built into the game. The more experienced computer-people in the group could screen share as they worked, and the team could work out the problems together. Everyone wins!

It has worked out really, really well. Everyone has enjoyed these CTFs, including me. I’ve only written a few so far, but they include:

  • Breaking a password to get into a security camera interface
  • Finding the GPS coordinates of an arms deal that is going down, hidden in a base-64 string
  • Decoding a message between two terrorists, hidden in an image
  • Cracking a cipher (spoilers) to get the code words for the security team on duty needed for a break-in!

You can find them the few I’ve written so far here on Github.

These ideas were heavily influenced by the excellent CTF run by the one and only Connor Tumbleson, at Sourcetoad.

Writing CTFs with ChatGPT

I would highly recommend adding a real world CTF to your next role playing adventure. But who has the time? Enter AI with ChatGPT. One of the scary things about ChatGPT is that it writes decent code, but it is only as good as the prompts you give it, and it is NOT secure. So basically anything you tell the bot to write for you has an exploit big enough to drive a bus through. This should be scary to anyone using it for production work, but it is amazing for CTFs.

I’ve also used ChatGPT to write quick and dirty interfaces (like the security camera on-off switch). Is it pretty? No! Would I use anything like that for a client or anywhere near a production environment? Hell no! But it’s MORE that good enough for a fun evening with friends, gathered around a Zoom table, working out how to hack into a secret vault.