5 Free, Must-Have Tools for Outsourcing

If you think it's tough keeping lines of communication open with Mike in the cubicle across the room, try to imagine managing a web development team based outside the U.S. The difference is literally day and night, because as the sun rises here in Boston, the sun is setting in Hanoi, Vietnam, where Pinyadda's development team is located.

For Pinyadda, this process is full of give and take...

The give? Interacting with a developer 8,000 miles away is much more difficult than interacting with one eight feet away. Add to this a small language barrier and a massive time zone difference and offshore development begins to look like a daunting task.

The take? Outsourcing to places like Vietnam tends to be cheaper without any sacrifice on the quality of development at all.

In our eyes the benefits far outweigh the frustrations.

Here are five must-have tools that will enable you to outsource effectively.

1. Skype
Skype's chat function is great, the skype-to-skype phone calls are always free and the wide-range of emoticons help overcome anything that may otherwise get lost in translation (kidding....sort of). I use this every single day to communicate with our developers and would be absolutely lost without it.

2. MediaWiki
As the free software behind Wikipedia.org, MediaWiki allows you to create a wiki that strictly revolves around your project. Specs, meeting agendas and brainstorms can be available for anyone to view and edit anytime. This is a much healthier alternative than emailing Word documents back and forth.

3. Google Docs
Specifically Google's spreadsheets. This is great for bug squashing.

4. Screentoaster
Anyone on either side of outsourcing knows the following phrase all too well: "But it is working here." With Screentoaster, you can capture of a video of your screen to precisely show what exactly you did to encounter a bug

5. DropBox
Have large files to send and emailing them would take too long? Just Dropbox it. Think of it as a specific folder on your machine that can be sync'ed up to anyone else's machine. We use this everyday for collaborating on Photoshop files that would take forever to send over email.

There you have it: 5 free tools that make outsourcing development work much less complicated. Stay tuned for my next post where I will highlight our team in Vietnam.