Trusting the Relationship Between The Parties

Outsourcing the project to the independent consultant from the Internet is a matter of risk. Moreover, it is a risk for both of the parties. You take the risk to invest the money and the time and not to get the results, you may get the result and stay alone without the support of the consultant. Or you may just be suffered because of the developer's incompetence and lack of skills. Developer takes the risk to deliver the results of his hard work and not to get payed (or receive the payment not right in time), he can be forced to do more work because of the poor specifications. The project may stay without the investments if this is the case when the development was started with the purpose to find the investor.

This risk is necessary and possible to reduce to the minimum degree. For this purpose you and consultant need to know as much as possible about one another. The easiest way to ensure in the consultant's competence is to check references in his resume. Get in touch with his former employers and find their opinions about his personality and his work. Seek for the information in the search engines (Google etc.) entering his first and last names or username (email part before @ character) as the keywords. He certainly wrote a messages in a forums. If he runs the site then you may try to find his contact information in the WHOIS database (for example www.networksolutions.com).

To ensure in his competence and skills you may request him to do some test task. This task shouldn't be very big or the standard one (the lattest thing is to exclude the opportunity to use ready scripts from www.hotscripts.com and similar sites). Ask him to send you program source code. Just review it yourself. Even if you understand nothing in programming science, the plain aesthetic look and feel of the source of his program can tell you all. Lack of comments, poor formatting, usage of mixed lower and upper case for the same keywords - all that are the signs of the non-proficient programmer. Give these sources to your programmer friends or simply just post it to some programming-related forum, and ask for opinions of third persons.

On the other hand the consultant may want to get some equal information about you, for example to ensure in your credibility and willing to pay, and background of your relations with other offshore consultants. It would be a proof of your good intentions to give that information to him. If you used services of the offshore programmers before give their contacts.

Remember, lack of trust between you and your consultant may fail the whole business, thus you should be honest and require the honesty.