Gartner Research

How to Select and Contract for Outsourced Agile Development Services

Published: 13 September 2023

Summary

Organizations that need multidisciplinary development teams plan to use more external custom software development providers. This research shows sourcing, procurement and vendor management leaders how to evaluate outsourced agile or DevOps providers’ performance, quality and accountability.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • When using outsourced software development providers for agile development, organizations face significant governance challenges — for example, around delivery responsibility, productivity commitment (trade-off between quality and velocity), capacity management and skill availability.

  • Sourcing, procurement and vendor management (SPVM) leaders who only have experience with fixed time and budget contracts may struggle to determine the appropriate selection criteria for agile software development services.

  • Organizations that use traditional methods when managing incremental delivery from a software development services provider continue to use legacy metrics and fail to shift from a culture of control to one based on trust. This creates conflict

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