What to Know Before Working with a Software Company

Partnering with a software company is a strategic choice that shapes your digital future. The right partner accelerates your time-to-market, controls costs, and elevates customer satisfaction. This guide covers everything from clarifying business needs and managing technical debt to GDPR/KVKK compliance, DevOps maturity, and CI/CD automation—organized into actionable checklists for both executives and engineers.

1) Clarify Needs and Success Metrics

Define business objectives and KPIs, then translate them into user stories and a realistic MVP. Include product-market fit, timing, budget, and risk tolerance. Technology choices (e.g., microservices vs monolith) should follow the goals, not the other way around.

• Prioritize user stories and lock the MVP scope.
• Make success measurable (e.g., 20% organic growth in 90 days).
• Discuss integration needs and data privacy requirements up front.

Practical tip

Draft a one-page “project canvas”: audience, value proposition, core flows, integrations, security & compliance, success metrics, and risks. It speeds up RFPs and estimates.

2) Technical Capability and Architecture

Seek proof: relevant case studies, cloud expertise (AWS/Azure/GCP), Kubernetes/Docker operations, robust API design and documentation, data storage choices, caching, and event-driven patterns.

Architecture checklist

• Clean architecture and clear dependency boundaries
• Observability: centralized logs, metrics, tracing
• Performance budgets and load testing
• Tracked and repaid technical debt

3) Security, Compliance, and Privacy

Security must be designed in: encryption at rest/in transit, identity & access management (SSO, OAuth 2.0, OIDC), OWASP Top 10, dependency scanning and SBOM, incident response, backups, and DR plans.

4) Project Management

Favor transparency: clear roadmaps, time-boxed sprints, regular demos, and retrospectives. Prioritization methods like RICE or MoSCoW keep scope under control; discovery practices (research, prototyping) reduce waste.

5) CI/CD, Testing, and DevOps

Invest in automated pipelines: unit/integration/e2e tests, contract testing, feature flags, blue/green and canary releases, IaC, linting, static analysis, coverage thresholds, semantic versioning, and one-click rollback.

6) Pricing Models and Contracts

Understand trade-offs among fixed-price, time & material, and retainers. Ensure clarity on change requests, milestones, SLAs, IP ownership, NDAs, sub-contractors, and support obligations.

7) UX, Accessibility, and Performance

Great products minimize friction: invest in UX research, accessibility (WCAG), and web performance (LCP, INP, CLS). Consider mobile-first design and PWA capabilities.

8) Integrations, Data Quality, and Analytics

Modern systems rely on stable APIs and webhooks, rate-limit strategies, validated data pipelines (ETL/ELT), and self-service analytics with executive dashboards.

9) Maintenance and Team Continuity

Plan for the long term: runbooks, escalation paths, documented infrastructure and coding standards, and structured handovers keep systems healthy.

10) Compare Proposals Fairly

Evaluate value and risk reduction, not only price. Inspect scope detail, delivery plans, testing and CI/CD maturity, and support SLAs.

11) Trend Tech—Use Wisely

AI-powered automation, cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, serverless), headless/micro-frontends, and edge computing can unlock advantages—validate through small pilots and total cost of ownership.

12) Final Pre-Kickoff Checklist

• MVP scope and KPIs written and agreed?
• GDPR/KVKK and backup policies defined?
• CI/CD, test strategy, and rollback ready?
• Contract clarity on IP, NDA, SLA, and change process?
• Reporting dashboards and maintenance plan in place?

The right software partner prepares you for tomorrow’s scale, security, and innovation needs. Use these checklists to de-risk delivery, accelerate value, and let technology propel your business forward.

• Gürkan Türkaslan
• 4 October 2025, 12:10:23