Frequently Ask Questions (FAQ)

Our service

Where do your main customers spread?

Abstract Technology provides professional offshore outsourcing services to the international software industry.
We specialize in outsourcing software development, and have solid experience in doing business with customers abroad, especially in Europe and America.

Can you provide the references of your previous customers?

Our customers are mainly in Europe, America and Australia. We can provide our customer reference if you would like to know us more. For your evaluation, we would like to provide the contact of some of our customers. You can get comments from them on our work.

How can I benefit from working with Abstract Technology and what are the advantages dealing with your company?

Abstract Technology assures that your project will be done on time, to budget, and in accordance with modern quality and technical standards. You can outsource Abstract Technology your IT projects ranging from a simple utility to a total automation of your business. It is confidential and reliable. Copyright on the final software belongs to you. Also, by using our services, you will reduce the cost by 50% at least. You also achieve savings on equipment, maintenance and infrastructure required during the development. Learn additional information on why Abstract Technology and our offshore outsourcing methodology.

What services Abstract Technology provide?

Abstract Technology provides a wide range of offshore outsourcing services including:

• Services offerings: Dedicated offshore resource, Offshore development center (ODC), Custom software development, Technology consulting, Offshore support, localisation, Test outsourcing.
• Technology: Java, PHP, Perl, C++, C#, .NET, LAMP.
• Industry: e-Business, Finance, Manufacturing, e-Government, Education, Logistics, Desktop Publishing, Computer Graphics, Online Payment.
• Experience: SharePoint, SCM, CMS, Flash, EAI, Network Management, Embedded Technology, Web Development.

What do you need from me to create a proposal?

You don't need to prepare anything before asking for a proposal - just contact us and we will ask questions to determine what is needed from you to create a proposal. Usually it will be whatever technical documentation, specifications, and design documents you have. Access to your project team members for answering questions is essential

How we will be communicating with the development team and on the documentation provided?

a. Language - all communications on the project can be done in English. All of our staff speaks English.
b. Documentation - all the related documentations are composed in English.

How can I be assured of high quality, reliable software?

Our offshore software development methodology is aimed at quality and only quality. You will have preliminary versions of the software installed at your location for internal testing, verification and acceptance. Within 3-month warranty period after the software was installed in production release, any bug (s) in the code will be corrected free of charge.

Can I get an overview about the cost of my software system?

Yes, no doubts. Just contact us or request for quote form, our analysts will approach you as soon as possible. After analysing your particular requirements, they will present you our free preliminary review.

Can we become long- term partners?

We are very experienced with the operation of offshore software development. Most of our clients are our long-term partners. It proves our success in obtaining customer's satisfaction. In order to establish a mutual benefit relationship, we could start from a non-critical pilot project, so that we could know each other better in both technical and commercial aspects.
To obtain long-term partners, we offer special price of our quality service for such pilot projects

What is the Time Zone Difference?

Time difference between UK and the Eastern United States - UK is approx. 8 hours ahead.
Time difference between UK and the Western United States - UK is approx. 5 hours ahead.
Time difference between UK and Hong Kong - UK is approx. 8 hours behind.
Time difference between UK and Australia - UK is approx. 11 hours behind.

I am concerned about the delays introduced both by the difference in time zones and in the delays of other project priorities.

Absolutely but provided that you and we have clear understanding about the application to be developed. After we negotiated and agreed on all the features, functionality and UI, we will be able to make a specification, working schedule with milestones and checkpoints. Also our project managers work overtime often to ensure good dialog and prompt replies to your questions.

What do you do to insure IP protection?

We guarantee high degree of confidentiality and security in every project. All clients' information remains strictly confidential by using Active Directory to manage the users' authorities. The data can only be viewed by the authorized staffs, and all the copies or editions of the data are clearly recorded by logs that clients can check at any time. At the same time we sign a Non-disclosure agreement with every our staff to protect clients' intellectual property and copyright.
The computers for development don't have CD-Rom and floppy disk driver. There will be training about IP protection for new staffs. The working areas are primarily divided according to project teams. It is clearly stated in our policy that talking project information off working hours is forbidden.
For more information please see our Intellectual Property (IP) Protection Policy.

I have concerns about Intellectual Property Ownership. Who owns the final product?

Most often out customers hold the copyrights and own the final product. This is fixed in the contract.

How can I start using Abstract Technology services?

Contact us with your business requirements, idea or simply questions.

Our organization

How many professional engineers employed by your company and how about their education background?

We have over 60 employees at present. They are all well educated holding at least bachelor degree. All of them can work with functional English (read and speak) and most of them speaks English very well. We put emphasis on experience in our recruiting, so we have some really outstanding staff who have valuable experience not only in IT area but also in project. They can bring their collective expertise to you at competitive price.

Does all the staff speak English?

Most of our project members have passed the CET-6 (College English Test-6) and are fluent with technical English (both written and spoken). Also our staffs take annual technical English training in the famous software engineer education center - School of Computer and Control in Beijing Institute of Technology. We accept all forms of communication; actually, we are now keeping in touch with our customers via email, instant messenger, telephone and IP phone.

How do you recruit?

We have a long term partnership with one of the biggest human resources company www.51job.com. We are continuously interviewing experienced developers to keep our technical advantages.

What training do you provide your engineering staff?

We provide thorough training courses before assigning work to the new staff, including three parts: first part is the company rule training, second is the company environment training, and third is position training, which ensure the employee could get the main consciousness about the company and his job. Technical trainings on latest technology are held from time to time to encourage our developers to learn new stuffs.

Our experience

What types of projects have you done, what is your specialization?

Our firm has already successfully completed over 50 projects including Java application, product development, e-business, e-government, education, finance, manufacture and technology consulting. We are best in .Net, Java, PHP and Perl development.

Have you built Windows-based applications yet?

Most of the projects we have done are Windows-based applications. But we also do cross platform applications.

Do you have any experience on Java?

Sure! Many projects we have done are based on the Java technique. We have abundant experience on it. Here are our success stories based on Java.

What's your extensive experience on application servers?

We do have extensive experience on application servers including Weblogic, Websphere, Jboss, Resin, etc.
We have over 200 man-months experience on the software development based on J2EE.

Does your company have experienced engineers in development of telecommunications systems and network systems?

We have experience in CISCO IP phone and router related system development for one of customers.

Can you start a project from any phase?

We can start a project from any phase, such as design, coding, testing As a matter of fact, we have done such a project of continued development and performance tuning.

Project management

How do you control time spent in the project?

Our service can start from any phase of a project, such as design, coding, testing. Firstly, we'll make the project schedule and preliminary review according to your module specifications. Then we submit the workload (in man hour) for your reference. After careful consideration and sufficient negotiation, we both side work out a rationale schedule, which ensures quality as well as efficiency. At this point, it's our duty to carry out the schedule strictly.

How do clients control the project progress?

You do have full control over the development; We have developed a repeatable, effective software development process based upon CMM (Capability Maturity Model). We usually submit our weekly report to our customers by e-mail, including the work completed that week and the work plan for the next week. This ensures there will be no unpleasant surprises at the end of the development.
We also offer the project management of onProject. If you are our customers, you can see your projects up and running in every phase by that. You will keep up with the process of your project at any moment.

Do you have process documentation?

All processes are well documented, institutionalised and evaluated. As a very important part of software development process, the documentations will be produced and submitted to you:

Your development process looks complicated. Is it really necessary?

The software development process is complicated by its nature. Our development methodology only reflects it. Excluding any stage leads to higher risk and lower quality. Sometimes we are asked to simply provide programmers, but such "savings" on management, planning, testing and documentation bring many problems in future and the final cost of the software system becomes much higher, if the software system will be finished at all.

Can we send a project manager to your location for close cooperation?

Since direct communication can avoid many unnecessary misunderstanding, we welcome your project manager working on our site. We can arrange an office for your project manager and we would like to provide other convenience as well.

Do you include project management at your end?

We do have project management for every of our project. Our service has been proved by the satisfaction of our customers.

How do you manage testing?

We usually perform testing at three different stages. They are plan testing at system analysing phase, unit testing at coding phase and integration testing after the project has been completed. So each project experiences 3-phase testing: Alpha version, Beta version and final version.

What makes a typical software package provided by Abstract Technology?

A typical software package usually contains:
* Software itself
* Quality Assurance documentation
* Requirements documentation and design documentation.
* User's Guide
* On-line context-sensitive help
* Installation program and instructions
* Completely documented source code
* Maintenance instructions

How do you manage the delivery on the contracted work?

For medium projects, we make the delivery through two stages: Beta version delivery and final delivery. As for big project, the delivery will be realized in more phases.

About pricing

How do you charge for your services?

Our hourly rate ranges from 30 to 80 GB pounds depending on the technology used.
However, we offer a special price of 30 pounds/hour for our first project.

How do you determine how much a project costs?

First, information is gathered about the proposed product through examining prior software, existing specifications, and by interviewing project team members at your company. All the information gathered is then analysed and the project is broken down into smaller components, which are estimated separately. Follow up questions are asked, and past similar projects are used for costing guidelines. Please click here to get a quote.

How can I be sure in your productivity and that you don't overcharge me?

You monitor every phase of development. Every phase has material results that you can see and review. If required, we can provide Individual in charge of Accounting and Status Reporting. The complete scope of the work is defined at the initial phase of development and approved by you. Of course, we are interested in long-term cooperation with you. Additional reason, isn't it?

How do I pay?

The simplest and the most secure way is to use wire transfers. In the UK the expenses on offshore software development are tax deductible. Also we accept payment with Paypal.