Today's article is a bit different than my usual QA related articles. Today I will make a case of outsourcing software projects to Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is becoming a powerhouse in software outsourcing very fast . Over the last few years, the volumes of software projects (off shored/outsourced) have grown to almost double yearly. More that 20,000 people are now directly connected with Software and IT services. Among them, a large portion of that resource is involved with exporting services to European, North American and East Asian clients. We are regularly participating Netherlands Trade Fair and CeBIT.

Bangladeshi freelancer community has further supplemented the IT exports by close to US$7 million in 2010. Bangladesh appears in one of the top 3 positions consistently in freelancing platforms( ODesk, Elance and Freelancer etc). Here is an interesting article about this phenomenon.

Bangladesh has a huge supply of young, trained ,skilled and English speaking resources available at costs almost 40% lower than countries like India or Philippines. If all other costs like infrastructure, support and management is considered the price advantage with those competing outsourcing destinations become even more prominent. Cost of living in India (for example) is fast becoming comparable with countries like Malaysia or Thailand. And thus the future of outsourcing advantage to India is decreasing every year. This is where Bangladesh shines the best with very similar educational standards and processes, Bangladeshi resource pool is yet not fully tapped and it's a potential candidate to become a major software outsourcing destination is very much like India back in 90's. KPMG did a strategic whitepaper sometime back highlighting this potential and it is a very good read to gain some idea of what is happening.

Apart from the freelancing community the more formal software organizations are also becoming mature in the field. A very good example is my previous Employer Kaz Software has been doing software development outsourcing from Bangladesh since 2004. More such companies are being setup with proper development  process and management required for outsourcing needs. The creative culture for software development of such organizations are also noteworthy.
And recently, software association in Bangladesh BASIS(Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services) is promoting top freelancers and freelancing companies with out sourcing award 2013. And KAZ software is one of them.

So we ,technology workers, are looking to a great future in software outsourcing in Bangladesh. I am adding a minimum rate sheet to get some idea about the costing. [Sources : Different freelancing platform]. The rate will be changed depending on company to company.