Staff Augmentation
What is a staff augmentation in outsourcing?
Outsourced staff augmentation is a strategy used by organizations to expand their software development capabilities by partnering with CodeStringers to add one or more personnel to existing internal development teams. This approach is commonly employed to address various challenges, such as filling skill gaps, increasing team velocity/capacity, or the need for specific expertise. Clients engage CodeStringers to hire requirements analysts, user experience and interface designers; backend, frontend and/or mobile developers; quality control testers; and test automation engineers.
What type of companies does this engagement model fit?
Virtually any company building a software product may benefit from this model, but common examples include:
- Software development departments that need to augment internal development teams.
- Startup technology companies that have a development organization, but want to reduce the cost of expanding that team and/or gain access to skills that they cannot recruit in-house.
The commonality of customers augmenting staff is that they have both the internal leadership to manage a development program and a well-defined development plan (software release plan) where the only missing ingredient is the quantity of personnel and/or expertise to execute the plan.
What makes CodeStringers unique in providing outsourced dedicated teams?
CodeStringers development subsidiary is located in Vietnam. Firms wanting “round the clock” development benefit from hiring offshore teams rather than either onshore or nearshore. Those clients spend their workday defining requirements and addressing open questions from the offshore personnel such that when the client’s workday is ending, the offshore team is coming online to execute tasks defined by the client’s personnel.
What are key considerations when choosing an offshore staff augmentation partner?
Maximizing the value of offshore personnel requires that the client:
- Clearly defines product requirements and/or include in their staff augmentation plan a CodeStringers’ requirements analyst who is responsible for refining high-level requirements (adding negative use cases, defining business logic, and communicating requirements to user experience and interface designers, software developers and quality assurance engineers.
- Make sure that using an offshore partner is the best option based on your internal processes and communication methods. There’s a time for offshore and there’s a time for nearshore. If you like the idea of waking up each day to see the outcome of requirements you defined the prior day, offshore is a good option. But if you value significant time zone overlap to facilitate real-time communication and collaboration, nearshore may be a better option.
- Ensure that you have adequate systems in place for communication and collaboration. This should include at a minimum a requirements/defect and agile project management tool such as Atlassian Jira; a real-time chat application such as Slack; and a web meeting application such as Zoom.
- Ensure you have enough daily overlap with the offshore team to address questions and impediments. In the case of CodeStringers, our personnel will adjust their work schedules to overlap with their client counterparts.
CodeStringers is a leading staff augmentation provider
CodeStringers has provided staff augmentation to clients ranging from startups to large corporations and has the expertise, experience and personnel to cost-effectively augment your teams and provide you with round-the-clock development.