This year’s layoffs and unemployment rates have increased dramatically. As this Reuters article puts it, "The dot com bubble was a cake walk compared to this job market".
As the economy worsens, technology firms have been using outsourcing companies to supplant their thinning engineering and technology teams, at least until the economy picks back up. This can be a cost effective way to maintain your company’s quality of service and product development life cycles. But in order to capitalize on this cost savings technique, you really have to have knowledge about how you plan to manage these offshore resources and make sure they can really provide the value you need.
Finding great outsourcing firms that "manage themselves" can be difficult and time consuming. This article has some resources that can help you find what you are looking for.
At Startech Global, we can also provide you free consulting in how to assess your situation before recommending which route you should take when using outsourcing firms like ours. Contact us, let us know what situation you’re in and we’ll do our best to find a great solution that makes sense to you and your budget.
As budgets are cut and companies are having a hard time finding funding, layoffs and unemployment rates raise inevitably. Many companies end up laying off Test and QA engineers first because they believe that these teams are not as critical to their team as other software engineers. We believe that if quality suffers, everything else suffers just as much and you risk losing your reputation with your clients.
While Test and QA engineers are critical, without the software architects to design the systems, there is nothing to test. Replacing great software architects are difficult in general and nearly impossible when using outsourcing firms.
Our company has experience in all aspects of software development, including test, QA, software architecture/development/design and has either worked with clients collaboratively design, test and maintain systems or have taken the lead in design decisions. Here are some examples of past or current working relationships we have with clients:
- Acted as a supplementary team of QA engineers working on large scale QTP (Quick Test Pro) project
- Supported client’s core development team by maintaining, refining and testing Java code
- Architecture and design of client’s .Net/SQL Server/ASP.Net enterprise level business application they plan to market by the end of this year
- Redesign of existing outdated PHP web applications to more modern frameworks like Drupal, Symfony, Smarty and other popular frameworks
- Massive debugging, unit, functional and quality control testing projects for both web applications and standalone desktop applications
- Supplementing the client’s front end HTML to Flash design projects while they focus on their core backend functionality
- Acting as the adjunct social media and marketing team for development of social media marketing.
For specific case study information, check out our case studies page. Whatever the situation is, we have experience in helping our clients maintain their competitive edge in this tough economy. Putting your trust in any outsourcing firm for long term large scale projects is difficult. That’s why we offer test projects on a smaller scale before you have to decide to move forward with us. We believe it gives us both an opportunity to observe how our teams collaborate and if we are the correct solution for your situation. Our goal is to provide value to the customer, and if that means that after our initial assessment we feel there are better service providers besides our firm for your unique circumstance, we will assist you in finding them by making recommendations that are in your best interests.
For more information on how you can sign up for your test project, please contact us by email or phone.
Category: Globalization, Outsourcing Tips, Technology