A Can of Worms

Australia is currently going through a technology adjustment. Defence, medical, and mining sectors have locked away a large section of the software developer community, and other sectors such as banking and insurance are pulling in developers to work on unifying systems of companies that have merged to cut costs. This is making it hard to find good people, and is raising costs of writing software in Australia at a time when sales are shrinking due to the world financial crisis.

A solution to the rising onshore costs is to outsource modules to offshore teams. Choosing to offshore to developing countries can have its pitfalls. Their economies are new, qualifications untrustworthy, and they have not been exposed to high quality development shops that instil good practices. In India employee turnover is so high that the workers are thinking about where they are going to work next rather than focusing on the job that they should be doing. The quality and productivity of 5 overseas workers often does not reach that of 1 Australian developer.

A further difficulty with outsourcing operations is ensuring developers produce work that meets Australian expectations. The hardest customers to please are Australians. If Australians aren’t happy with what they receive they will push back, therefore it is important when delivering a service for Australians that work is delivered on schedule with the functionality at the quality level required – otherwise client’s business is disrupted dealing with non-core issues.

Companies also need to think about which trading partners are going to bond with them in the future. As the American economy slides and China’s economy grows China starts to become an attractive export market for software products and services. Unfortunately the cultural and language barriers make it difficult to break into this market.  This gap can be bridged with a partner in Taiwan.

The Plan

Australians Offshore, in Taiwan, directly managing developers to meet the specifications that the Australian managers themselves developed with the customer while being onshore in Australia. The development office is in Taiwan and hires people in Taiwan to develop software on a contract basis for Australian companies. The developers are a mix of local Taiwanese, Australians and Europeans as these are the predominant groups in the software industry in Taiwan. The management team are all Senior Software Engineers with management experience and work in person with the developers on a day to day basis to produce a quality deliverable. The management team all have experience working in Taiwan, and are Taiwan residents. See About Taiwan for more information.

Various levels of Software Engineering practice are from provided from Agile with short development cycles to the full United States Department of Defence Standard Procedure for Software Engineering where the complete Requirements, Test, Design and Validation documentation for each component of a project are part of the deliverables. Agile methodology is the preferred choice where the customer has no specific requirement.

This page was last modified on Saturday, May 02, 2009 01:41:32 PM