Choose a development partner on evidence, not on the pitch. Talk to the engineers who will write your code, ask how they handled projects that went wrong, look at how they scope the work, and test them on a small piece of real work with written acceptance criteria before you commit to a large project. For Nordic buyers the contract matters as much as the team: who you sign with, under which law, how personal data is protected and who owns the code. We see this from both sides. We are a vendor ourselves, and in our modernization and rescue work we take over code written by other teams. This is the checklist we would use.
Who should you talk to before you sign?
The biggest red flag is a vendor that puts salespeople between you and the engineers. If your first three meetings are with account managers and project managers but never with a developer, ask why. Engineers give you honest assessments of feasibility, timeline and technical risk. Sales tells you what you want to hear. A good partner lets you talk directly to the people who will write your code, including the senior engineer responsible for architecture.
How did they handle projects that went wrong?
Every experienced team has projects that didn’t go to plan. Ask about them. How did they handle scope creep? What happened when a key developer left mid-project? How did they recover from a missed deadline? A partner who can discuss failures openly, and explain what they changed afterwards, is more trustworthy than one who claims a perfect record.
How do they scope the work?
Be careful with a fixed quote after a single call. Either the estimate is heavily padded, or the change orders come later. A good partner invests time in understanding your business before proposing a solution: they ask about your users, your constraints and your definition of success, and they push back on requirements that don’t make sense. Discovery costs a fraction of the project and is the cheapest place to find out the scope is wrong.
Is the team stable?
Turnover is the silent killer of outsourced projects. Every time someone rotates off your project, you lose weeks of context. Ask how long their engineers have been with them, what happens if your lead developer leaves, who else knows the codebase, and whether documentation is part of the work or an afterthought.
What do they put on the line?
Good partners share some of the risk. That can be a first sprint with written acceptance criteria you can walk away from, a warranty period on delivered work, or simply fixing their own bugs without charging extra. Ours is a first-sprint guarantee: before we start, we agree in writing what the first two-week sprint must deliver. If the sprint-1 demo doesn’t meet those acceptance criteria, you can stop and you don’t pay for that sprint. If a vendor won’t offer anything like this, ask yourself why.
How deep is their engineering?
Ask technical questions during the evaluation. What is their testing strategy? How do they run database migrations in production? How do they handle security and dependency updates? How do they manage technical debt? You don’t need to be a developer to judge the answers. You’re listening for specifics. “We follow best practices” is a warning sign; good engineers like talking about their craft and give detailed, opinionated answers.
What should Nordic buyers check in the contract?
Use this checklist for any vendor, wherever their engineers sit.
| Check | What to ask for | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Contract and governing law | Who you sign with, under which law, and where disputes are settled. For a Swedish buyer, a Swedish company and Swedish law keep it simple. | A contract with a foreign entity under foreign law, or with an intermediary that doesn’t do the work |
| Who actually writes the code | Names, seniority and location of the engineers, and the senior person responsible for architecture and code quality. Meet them before you sign. | ”The team will be assigned after signing”, or subcontractors that aren’t disclosed |
| Personal data (GDPR) | A data processing agreement (DPA, in Swedish personuppgiftsbiträdesavtal) before anyone touches personal data. If engineers work outside the EU/EEA, the legal basis for the transfer, usually the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), and a list of sub-processors. | Production access “just for debugging” without a DPA, or no clear answer on where the engineers are |
| Acceptance criteria | Written acceptance criteria for the first sprint or milestone and how they are checked at the demo, with payments tied to accepted deliverables. | Payments tied only to dates or hours, with no definition of done |
| Code ownership | IP that transfers to you on payment, written into the contract; code in a repository you can access from day one; infrastructure in your own cloud account. | Code in the vendor’s repository, a licence instead of ownership, or hosting only in the vendor’s account |
| Continuity and exit | A second engineer who knows the codebase, documentation as part of the work, a clear notice period and a full handover of repositories, credentials and documentation at the end. | Long lock-in, or everything depending on one person |
How do we answer the same checklist?
You sign with Smoother Development AB, a Swedish limited company, under Swedish law. Our engineering team works from Ukraine; every team has a senior engineer responsible for architecture and code quality, and a founder is accountable for every project. Ukraine is outside the EU/EEA, so before anyone on the team touches personal data we sign a DPA with the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, and we host in EU regions by default. You own the code once it’s paid for. The details are on our security and data protection page, and we compare working with teams in different regions in nearshore vs offshore development.
What to do next
Whoever you choose, start small: a code audit, a discovery phase or a first sprint with written acceptance criteria tells you more than any pitch. Our prices are published, from engineers by the hour to fixed-price monthly teams and projects, on our pricing page, and our guide to what custom software costs helps you compare quotes.
