I tried posting this in the PB LinkedIn group and got no responses - maybe my question is too vague - but thought I would try it here too.
We have a fairly complex program and a fairly complex spec for a significant feature to add. My guess is it might take a week of concentrated work to add the feature, and I'm tempted to try contracting it out. However, I'm worried about how much extra time would be required to get all the required pieces to the contractor, get them up to speed on the bits of the program they would be changing, review their code when it came back etc.
I'm definitely competent to do the work myself, but because I'm running a 2-person software business with thousands of users, I have a lot of other demands on my time and am having a heck of a time carving out enough time to concentrate on this.
Does anyone have any thoughts about the merits of contracting out this sort of piecework for one complex feature of a program? I'm also open to offers from people who would consider taking something like this on, with details of how you see something like this working! And/or, is this something you think could be farmed out on a site like UpWork, which seems to have a number of PowerBuilder programmers on it?
If anyone wants to see the spec that describes this feature, it's at http://www.software4nonprofits.com/files/AlternateDONATIONCloudSolution.pdf. The only parts that remain to be done are everything in the last section, "Use Cases". I'm afraid the doc is 10 pages. What makes it a bigger job than it looks is all of the error handling that must be done at each stage.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.