When I started Assembla, Rentacoder was the first place that I advertised to find programmers, and I was not disappointed.  They have a huge number of talented contractors on their list.  Three years later, we are still working with some outstanding core team members that responded to that advertisement.  So, it's not a coincidence that our online workspaces fit perfectly with the Rentacoder idea of on-demand, global teams.  It's a privilege to be able to announce that Assembla is now officially providing workspaces for Rentacoder projects.

The Rentacoder integration demonstrates some interesting features of Assembla that other users can learn from, including the affiliate plan, branded portfolios, and user-defined configurations.  I'll discuss that below.

First, I will suggest some ways that you can adapt Rentacoder to an agile process.  When you post a job on Rentacoder, "coders" respond with fixed-price bids.  You select a coder by evaluating the price and track record of a coder, and start work on the fixed price job.  Rentacoder does arbitration to resolve any disputes about when the work is done.  This type of fixed-price bidding is great for small jobs, but it isn't very agile. 

We don't recommend doing fixed-price work, since that fixes your specification too early.  In our recommended process, you try working with "coders" for a week, and then ask them to join the long-term team if that works well, and typically pay hourly.  Rentacoder offers a couple of special features to make this work.  I used to buy a "bulletin board" advertisement from them.  You pay for this advertisement in advance, and then you aren't obligated to use the Rentacoder bidding and payment system.   However, I have just received word that Rentacoder will be soon be supporting hourly payments, which will work great with an agile process.

Let's look at some of the secrets of this integration.

User-defined configurations

We defined some template workspaces with custom configurations, and added them to the catalog with the tag "rentacoder", as you can see here.

Branded portfolios - Branding

The Rentacoder configurations are part of the Rentacoder branded portfolio, so they get a nice customized header, style, and link, like this.

Portfolios - Automatic permissions

In order to provide arbitration services, Rentacoder needs access to all communications between the client and the coder.  This helps them check to see if the client requested something new that wasn't in the bid, or if the coder offered something.  Assembla solves this problem because new Rentacoder spaces automatically become members of the Rentacoder portfolio.  The arbitrators are team members in the portfolio space, and they have read access to the member projects.  When the Rentacoder phase of the project is done, the project owner can remove the portfolio link, and work privately.

You can use this feature of Assembla user-defined configurations to accumulate proposals, contest submissions, or budget requests in a portfolio, and review them.

Affiliate Program