Nothing new this 2 weeks. Well, in fact tons of new stuff this 2 weeks, but no time to blog at all. We are experiencing extreme-2-week-game-development and are almost ready to release “how not to screw up big projects” book (this is a joke, everything’s under control).

Meanwhile, we posted some stuff at codebranch blog, and want to say “HI” to our folks at LeWeb in Paris this week 😉

Here are the previews for two next posts:

How to Accurately Estimate Projects for Outsourcing? Part I – Delays Caused by Communication

In addition to that, there’s been quite a few times, when our clients from other countries needed to clarify detailed info with a a third-party with no people on that side speaking English at all.
The main point of this section is to make you understand how heavily client interaction lag can affect the entire project. It’s worth mentioning because these things rather frequently fall out of scope of attention.

How to avoid possible adverse effects? A checklist or a roadmap will be helpful to manage handling tasks in advance. In Codebranch, we prepare a project roadmap with Freeze dates, which are the last dates that a certain part of team-client interaction is due

How to accurately estimate outsourcing projects. Part II: Accessing Web Services

1. Compatibility and environment issues.

The most common problem though is the environment. Whether it’s an API, a plugin to work with it, it may require additional adjustments to your server. Documentation should be carefully revised so that there are no flops when integrating the solution into your own website or service.

2. Sometimes a client wants solution for a service, that has no public API. i.e. Pinterest has no public API and provides a gateway just for iOS.

Developers start to use workarounds, gather together to find solutions. And so – 3rd party APIs are born. Returning to Pinterest, as a great example, apps that use 3rd party API access Pinterest via iOS gateway, identifying themselves as iPhone. Of course, that won’t always work as expected, even minor changes in Pinterest API now breaks almost every single app that uses 3rd party API.