Date:
20 October 2021
Author:
Alfred Deeb

Salsa’s new development partners

Salsa has recently selected three premium development partners so we can scale quickly to deliver important government digital projects. Our new development partners are:

Benefits for our clients

Benefits for our clients include the full Salsa customer experience led by long-term Salsarians, plus:

  • Increased capacity to meet timelines

  • Better rates to help meet budgets

  • Qualified capability to maintain our high coding standards

Our clients are already reaping the benefits of our new dev partners. For example, the replatforming of health.vic.gov.au onto SDPExternal Link has drawn on a backend (BE) resource and two quality assurance (QA) resources from our dev partners.

Why dev partners?

Over the past few years, Salsa has been delivering more and more great projects for the government. As we’ve grown, we’ve hired many new Salsarians. However, even with our expanded team, capacity was still a problem. Our full-time employees and contractors were stretched, and we had to start knocking back work.

We looked at several options, all with pros and cons. We could hire more people, but it’s often hard to find good people (especially Australian-based Drupal developers). In addition, project work comes in bursts, so hiring new people has drawbacks.

In the end we decided the best option was to partner with premium offshore partners so we could scale and be more elastic, growing and contracting in response to project demands.

So then our hunt began to find the best offshore partners.

Finding the right partners

Once we’d decided to go with the partner approach, we researched and reached out to quality dev partners that aligned with us technically and culturally. We met with the leadership teams to get a sense of the companies and cultures. We also did a thorough technical qualification, interviewing individual candidates to ensure the highest skill levels and a good cultural fit.

The goal was a small pool of quality partners, with pre-qualified individuals so we could get resources fast, when needed.

The three partners we chose — AxelerantExternal Link , QED42External Link , SrijanExternal Link and — all provide BE and frontend (FE) devs, and quality QA capacity (with an emphasis on automation).

How the partnerships work

Importantly for our clients, the Salsa experience is maintained. The key team members of engagement manager, solution architect and/or technical lead will be Salsa full-time employees or long-standing contractors. However, to support this core team will be a combination of Salsarians and hand-picked resources from one or more of our dev partners. Our mature dev and project onboarding processes ensure the process is seamless for clients.

Our standard technical leadership and code review process is also in place. Just like our in-house Drupal developers, the handpicked partner resources will work under the supervision of experienced tech leads.

Our work with dev partners is very much an extension of the way we work with clients and other partners (such as amazee.io and Today), in that we’re running a multidisciplinary team across organisations and locations.

We’re already drawing on the partnerships and loving the expertise we can access.