In 2000: Allied Testing LLC was set up by a team of professionals with many years' QA and testing experience.  We're a US registered company, with a UK subsidiary and offices in New York, London and Moscow.

The two founders of the company are still actively employed as senior executive directors and they control all the company's share capital.  The company applies conservative financial management principles and enjoys a sound financial position.  The company has no debt and has financed its growth from retained earnings. 

Cost was only part of the reason we located our testing facilities in Russia.  We also wanted to employ people with high educational levels that are rarely seen in testing, either in the US or Europe.  But they needed to understand the business environment of the software they were testing. 

So, we hired employees from the best Russian universities and technology institutes, with an emphasis on maths, physics and computer science.  We then gave them a thorough understanding of the business processes in securities trading: we conducted usability surveys amongst traders and analysts; we brought in trading specialists, to conduct training and financial engineering workshops in our Moscow offices; we introduced exams for our staff modelled on the professional qualification exams set by financial services regulators in the US and UK.

In 2002: We had 100 well trained professionals, who combined the educational qualifications of financial engineers, an understanding of business processes and the discipline of trained testers.  We operated from secure facilities, with various levels of market data access and with all the standard tools available on trader or investor desktops.  We developed a specialised financial testing methodology.  We integrated our industry knowledge into various tools and taxonomies and built specialised testing harnesses and knowledge databases.  We began to diversify from functional testing into performance testing and systems-server testing.

More importantly, we started to see our client's software in the context of their specific business activity and of their whole systems infrastructure.  Thus, in addition to testing, we could suggest improvements in other areas and our clients began asking us to perform business analysis, off-site software development and systems maintenance, as well as specialised R&D projects. 

In 2003: We started taking on mid-sized development projects, increasing the functionality of clients' products and building components for their trading systems.  We also started focusing on financial modelling, business analysis and the development of exchange simulators and market data generators for strategy validation and product testing.  But these new activities - and the staff we recruited for them - remained supplementary to our core business and were driven mainly by requests from existing QA clients. 

In 2004: We were able to offer services across the entire software development cycle, thanks to the skills of new recruits who had acted previously as consultants, with primary expertise in the design and development of trading systems.  We re-organised, we hired more developers and we integrated development methodologies into our existing QA, modelling and analysis framework. 

In 2006: At the start of the year we employed 260 staff and are growing at the rate of five employees a month, which can be increased - if necessary - to 15-18 per month.  We reached 316 employees by the end of 2006.  Testing remains our core competence and we apply QA methodologies to building our own internal processes and skills pool, as well as to the work we do for our clients.  This creates a solid foundation on which it is easy to expand and handle business activities for new clients and to build efficient and productive testing teams.

In 2007: The Company continued its growth and development.  Our staff increased by a third and reached 400 towards the end of 2007.  Our branch in Chisinau was recognized as one of the largest IT companies in Moldova.  We opened another branch in Minsk, Belarus.  We gained new clients, embarked on new projects and introduced new services including consulting.