Avantica Technologies Partners to Advance U.S. Education Sector

Avantica Technologies is doing its part to help improve U.S. education through its partnership with Measured Progress, the industry leader in Web-based customized student assessments. Measured Progress has built a nationwide business developing customized K-12 student assessments for schools, districts, and states. The non-profit company, founded in 1983, is focused on advancing student learning and today assesses more than 2.5 million students. Its philosophy: assessments are a means, not an end.

Measured Progress helps states and districts across the country comply with federal mandates to include all children in state-wide assessments and improve student learning. It works with state clients to provide customized, large-scale general and alternate assessments for K-12 students. Its innovative online classroom assessment and data management capability can be used by local educators to measure student knowledge relative to state and national standards.

Avantica Technologies testing engineers, based in the company’s Latin America software engineering centers (Costa Rica and Peru), and collaborating in an Agile model in the same U.S. time-zone, work closely with Measured Progress’ internal development team. The goal of the partnership is to deliver an effective and systematic software QA capability utilizing a set of metrics to evaluate various quality aspects; not only quality of the final product but also the quality of the whole process to deliver the final product.

Avantica Technologies, one of the largest Nearshore software engineering services specialists, utilizes leading testing tools, while facilitating remote access by Measured Progress to see the results as soon as they are generated. This enables Measured Progress to systematically deliver quality software to its customers across 17 states.

Juan Carlos Porras Rodriguez, Director of QA Services at Avantica Technologies is convinced that because Avantica is in the same time-zone, its testing is truly collaborative with Measured Progress’ internal development. And, as a result, aligned with the non-profit’s engineering goals. The result: quality software supporting quality education.

www.ArmedZilla.com: Social Networking Site for U.S. Veterans Delivers Largest Support Initiative in American History

ArmedZilla is a new social networking site focused on the U.S. Military community, providing a needed platform to connect military personnel, veterans, friends, family and supporters worldwide. The platform does what Facebook and other community platforms have not: fill a support and service gap missing far too long within the military community.

Currently, there are 24 million American veterans and more than two million men and women serving in the U.S. Military. Many feel a need to share experiences, make new connections while in the military, and stay connected once discharged. ArmedZilla’s site, accessible at no cost, provides this community with necessary and easy to use support services that helps them in their day-to-day lives. ArmedZilla members can share their stories, be recognized for their service, re-connect with former buddies, and interact with friends, family and supporters.

ArmedZilla is one of many new companies that represent the continued bold segmentation of the social networking ecosystem. As the cable television industry took the newtwork few to thousands of targeted, very specific audience channels, so too goes social networking. The audiences with specific, narrow interests served by cable television are many. Some narrow in a larger context – Food Network or HSN – others in a much smaller context: The Puppy Channel.

As more segmented community targeted social networking sites prepare to launch, the need for talented software engineering resources as enablers grows in parallel. The demand has easily outstripped supply. Specialists like Avantica Technologies, with its Agile-based Nearshore model (same time-zone, economical, available, English speaking developers) is filling the gap. ArmedZilla’s founder and CEO said about his company’s collaboration with Avantica:

“Our decision to work with Avantica is based on their ability to integrate their talented software developers and testers into our internal team. They were productive immediately, helping us meet our aggressive release goals.”

Avantica’s Latin America-based software developers worked closely with ArmedZilla’s internal development team to build a reliable, feature rich site that can scale to support rapid traffic growth. Avantica’s QA engineers, also part of the team, utilize leading testing tools supporting TC definition, test cycle execution, and QA results delivery. It’s a highly collaborative effort between the two companies built on an Agile engineering model designed to get the platform rapidly launched.

As CBS, NBC and ABC once dominated American television, only to give way to an ever more powerful cable television tidal wave of audience segmentation, many see an appropriate analogy for social networking. Facebook, LinkedIn and others may face a similar future.