25 Questions to Ask a Pakistani Software Company

The value of a vendor call is determined by the questions you bring. These are the ones that separate firms who have delivered from firms who have presented, grouped by what each group reveals.

Questions about failure

1. Tell me about a project that went badly. What happened, and what changed afterwards?
2. What was your last production incident, how did you find out, and how long did it take to resolve?
3. When did you last get an estimate badly wrong, and what did you do about it?
4. What would you push back on in my brief?
5. Which of your clients would say you were difficult to work with, and why?

Firms with real delivery history answer these specifically and without defensiveness, because failures are normal in engineering. Sanitised answers or denial of the premise are the finding.

Questions about ownership

6. Where will the code live from the first commit?
7. When does IP transfer to us, and what does it cover?
8. Who holds the cloud, domain, and app store accounts?
9. What happens to everything if we terminate in six months?
10. Can we see your master services agreement before the pitch?

Answer pattern	What it indicates
Code in your repository, IP on creation	Confidence and transparency
Code delivered at milestones	Process caution, reduced visibility
Vendor-owned repository, IP on final payment	A commercial model built on leverage

The outsourcing guide covers the terms these questions test.

Questions about people

11. Who exactly will work on this, and can I interview them?
12. How long have those engineers been with you?
13. What happens if one of them resigns next month?
14. Who is the accountable senior engineer for this outcome?
15. How many other clients do they work on simultaneously?

The pitch team is frequently not the delivery team. These five questions establish who actually does the work, which determines the outcome more than anything else you discuss.

Questions about method

16. Can I read a redacted specification from a past project?
17. What proportion of changes are reviewed, and by whom?
18. What do you test, and what do you deliberately not test?
19. How do you deploy, and how do you roll back?
20. What documentation will we receive, and when?

Answers here separate firms with a working method from firms with a stated one. Ask to see the artefacts rather than hearing about them. The vetting post covers how to evaluate them.

Questions about commercials

21. What does this price exclude?
22. How are changes assessed, priced, and approved?
23. How much of my team's time will you need each week?
24. What happens to the rate if we double or halve the engagement?
25. Which entity will we contract with, and under which law?

Question 21 is the most valuable on the list. Quotes differ most in what they leave out, and vendors who answer it precisely are describing a real scope rather than a number.

What about AI-specific questions?

Three more, if AI is part of the work: what evaluation dataset would you build, what accuracy did you achieve on a past system and where did it fail, and what does your production tracing show?

Firms that have shipped agents answer all three with artefacts. The AI agent hiring guide covers the standard.

How do you test communication during the call?

Ask an engineer to explain a past system's architecture in five minutes. Then ask for a short written summary of a problem and its resolution afterwards.

Those two exercises test spoken clarity and written precision, which are exactly the skills a distributed engagement uses. Written quality matters most, because it carries the project across the hours you do not share.

What if a firm will not answer something?

Ask why. Some refusals are legitimate: client names under confidentiality, commercially sensitive internal figures. Others are positions rather than constraints, such as declining to name your engineers or to share a contract template.

The distinction matters. A firm that explains its refusal is usually straightforward; one that deflects is telling you how the engagement will feel.

What should you do with the answers?

Score them on one sheet across all three candidates, weighted for your project, then commission a bounded pilot with the leader. Questions narrow the field; the pilot decides.

What does FISTA Solutions answer?

All twenty-five, on request. Code in your repository from the first commit, IP assigned on creation, named engineers you interview, the MSA before the pitch, exclusions stated in writing, and a Delaware contracting entity.

Related reading: how to vet a software company in Pakistan and best software companies in Pakistan, plus staff augmentation.

Bring the list to the call

Twenty-five questions, three companies, one sheet. That is a better selection process than any amount of research into the market.

Message FISTA Solutions on WhatsApp or start a project and ask us all of them.