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We have a project but we have very short period of time vs the requirements. We have only 2 developers and 1 designer. What we are thinking is to hire freelancers to help us on different modules and the core team will do the integration of the tasks from freelancer.

The coding pattern will be provided by our team and it should be followed by the freelancers and the core team will check the code before approving it.

The management is not willing to hire staff here as it is expensive so the only choice is to hire freelancers which will work on project based.

I know this is a risky approach, but I can't think of other solution for this. Any suggestion? Thank you.

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    You have little time with respect to scope, so do not expect a high quality. The code review (Core team checks the code) is the quality but it is time consuming. For me, you must put all the developers available on the project (Scrum method or whatever). let the team be organized technically on the choice of modules
    – Atmane El Bouachri
    Sep 27 '16 at 10:48
  • How short is the time frame? Days? Weeks? Months? How many additional resources will be engaged? Will the additional resources be co-located with the internal team?
    – Alan Larimer
    Sep 27 '16 at 12:14
  • you say freelancers, but surely contractors in the office would be a more sensible approach?
    – Ewan
    Sep 27 '16 at 13:57
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If you are already short on time, hiring freelancers, ie 'paid on completion of spec' is probably not a good choice.

Writing the spec, negotiating contracts, testing the product against the spec, going back for changes etc will all take up a lot of time. Unless you have a large chunk of easily defined work which is separate from the rest of the project I would not advise it.

Other options include :

Hire Contractors. ie paid per day, to work in the office with your perm team. You will have less work to do speccing and dividing up the project. Plus being right there in the office will reduce your concerns over code quality etc.

Use an off the shelf product to fulfil some of the requirements

Get tough on the requirements and deliver the bare minimum product

Just miss the deadline, after all, you might miss it for any number of reasons, presumably there is some penalty clause in the contract to cover the scenario.

From your question it sounds like you are locked down on Time, Scope AND Resources though. In which case there is no solution.

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"We have a project but we have very short period of time vs the requirements."

This seems to be the root of the problem, and by the sounds of it, it's an understatement. In this case I would want to pare down the initial delivery to the absolute MVP and phase the rest of the work.

From my perspective (and from experience using freelancers) hiring freelancers sounds too risky as it takes time to educate developers in the companies' practices and structures and to rush this is to introduce even more risk. This is also not fair on the freelancers themselves IMO.

OP doesn't specify, but I assume they are the PM in this instance. In which case I would suggest Jamcoder discusses de-scoping the deliverables with management and potentially the client to try and find a way of delivering an agreed product, because at the moment the whole project looks set to fail.

sorry to be so negative!

Good luck!

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