You can provide your own non-disclosure agreement. To enforce, you have to travel to that country and sue, and depending on the laws of the country, there are some possibilities, but extremely difficult ones. None of the outsourcing centers have complex intellectual property laws.
Try to develop the idea piece by piece (and integrate yourself) and use local developers to do this. It won’t be as cheap, but less risky.
Another option is to hire a company like https://diceus.com/services/offshore-software-development-company/ providing offshore development services. This way, you can always prosecute the local company in the event of any breach of contract. Since these companies are represented in the country in which they operate, they have legal means of enforcing contracts.
It is very important that you provide a complete specification of your project, mainly in wireframe, sketches or layouts. Make sure you have mockups that cover every detail. From home / landing page to exit. Regardless of where your developer is located (in the US, India or elsewhere), they need to look at layouts to understand exactly what you are looking for.
Without these sketches, your idea is in your head and you won’t have a good way to figure out what you need. If you ask 5 different programmers to create something similar to a certain application, to clone an application / site, the result will be different for each of them.
You still need to specify what exactly you want and how. This also includes correct text, ux, etc. Every subsequent change requires changes at every level (interface, design, internal database) and takes time, which is money.
You don’t really need templates or formal docs, just start with high-level flows and then draw each screen to see the end result, more specifically the onsite offshore model. As you dig deeper, you will see a good understanding of flow and also help you determine volume.
This is all the work with the user interface. If you can’t or don’t want to do this UX job, hire someone to do it. It makes sense to invest in this and start development only after these wireframes are complete.
The next step is registration. Ask the designer to create beautiful pages / screens. This may not be necessary depending on the project, but most startup applications / projects follow this process. This is the most important point that can make a big difference in the final stage.
When it comes to testing, offshore development companies don’t have a good track record. This is where the process begins. Do you have a development process, unit testing, automated testing, continuous build and integration so that issues are identified as they arise? Do you have a process for identifying and verifying that a unit test meets all of the application’s requirements? Usually a developer trial is included with the services, and you must have an additional trials contract covering the scenarios mentioned above. This process takes time and money, which is why many companies avoid it, which will sooner or later hurt them.
There is usually a warranty period for bug fixes, but there are many gray areas. Errors can be for various reasons, which can go beyond the original volume. For example, due to system load, another dataset, or another scenario or factor that may not be in the original area. Even discovering this requires some investigation, so you may be billed for this work that was triggered by events outside the scope of the work.
The development process is very important for the successful implementation of offshore developer projects. Having a detailed sketch or wireframe is critical to control the cost and quality of a project.
