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Software Team Extension Model – A Complete Guide

Stuti Dhruv
Team Extension

The need for expert software and app developers keeps increasing every other day. That is why many startups and even established businesses opt for software development outsourcing because of the many benefits they get from this model.

Since the need for expert software development team keeps on rising, both developers and business owners need to learn and comprehend team extension. Through this approach, tech companies can meet the tightest deadlines, get top talents, and deliver top-notch products and services in a highly competitive environment. This guide will give you all the valuable insights you need to read about the team extension model, including the benefits, challenges, and processes.

What is team extension?

Team extension is all about adding other expert members with skills and knowledge in a particular field to an already existing team to maximize production and speed up the processes.

Ideally, team extension is effective, especially when you want to meet a new initiative or when a project in process has a tight deadline. The extended team, therefore, offers extra support without affecting the original plan set by the original team.

Besides, team extension plays a big role in adding extra skills or complementing the already existing team with valuable skills that will scale the project in progress. Unlike some other software development hiring models, team extension focuses on long-lasting partnerships with the tech team and the hired experts. This makes the whole process reliable and flexible while minimizing extra expenses.

The pillars of team extension

Of course, every software development hiring model has its core values that distinguish it from other models. The team extension model is governed by the following pillars or rather core values.

Team augmentation is all about introducing new and valuable skills and abilities to the team to enhance the process for improved results. Team augmentation can only be achieved by adding new and skillful members to an existing team.

With an extended team through the team extension model, you can divide responsibilities between the existing team and the extended team evenly. This helps each team to focus on incredible service delivery, thus making the project turn out successfully.

Of course, team extension is all about adding experts and professionals to a team to add value to the projects. Once you hire professionals, you don’t need to worry about anything. As professionals, the extended team understands the basics, the plans, and the ideas that can make the project turn out successfully. Therefore, you will always have all the updates and useful insights appropriately.

Team Extension vs. Other Outsourcing Models

When exploring ways to scale your development capacity, one of the first decisions you’ll face is which outsourcing model is right for you. While the team extension model has gained widespread traction among product companies, especially those aiming to maintain high levels of internal control and cohesion, it’s not the only option on the table. Business owners and CTOs often wonder: What’s the difference between team extension and project outsourcing? Or, Is it better to hire freelancers or build a dedicated offshore team?

Let’s break down the key distinctions between team extension and other popular outsourcing approaches—namely staff augmentation, dedicated teams, managed services, and freelance hiring—and explain when each model fits best.

Team Extension vs. Staff Augmentation

At first glance, the terms team extension and staff augmentation may sound interchangeable. Both involve adding external talent to your in-house team. But the similarity ends there.

IT staff augmentation benefits include flexibility, speed, and cost-efficiency—especially when you need to fill short-term, transactional, and task-specific roles. A company might hire a Java developer or UI/UX designer for a few months to address a backlog, complete a fixed sprint, or cover temporary resource gaps. These professionals usually require minimal onboarding and are managed with a light touch.

In contrast, team extension is about long-term integration. You’re not just filling a role—you’re extending your team with developers who become embedded in your daily workflows, attend your stand-ups, adopt your coding practices, and share accountability for delivery. The relationship is deeper, more collaborative, and built on continuity.

So when should you use team extension instead of staff augmentation? If you’re looking to build institutional knowledge, maintain a consistent delivery velocity, and avoid the churn of frequently onboarding and offboarding temporary workers, team extension is the more sustainable option.

Team Extension vs. Dedicated Development Teams

The dedicated team model—popular among IT outsourcing vendors—sits somewhat closer to the team extension approach but still has meaningful differences.

With a dedicated team, you’re handed a standalone group of developers managed on your behalf by the outsourcing company. While you may have influence over priorities and technologies, the team is often semi-autonomous and doesn’t integrate deeply into your core workflows. Communication channels, management responsibilities, and team rituals tend to remain siloed.

Team extension, on the other hand, is designed for tight integration. Extended developers work alongside your in-house engineers, attend your internal planning meetings, follow your Jira boards, and report to your engineering leads. You maintain direct control, and the goal is cultural and operational alignment—not just output.

People often ask, Is it better to build a dedicated team abroad or integrate remote engineers into my existing team? If your project is isolated, time-bound, or peripheral to your main product, a dedicated development team might work. But if you’re building a core product or iterating continuously, team extension ensures cohesion and minimizes handoff risk.

Team Extension vs. Managed Services

Managed services represent an entirely different outsourcing philosophy. In this model, you’re outsourcing the outcome, not the people. You define the scope, agree on SLAs (service-level agreements), and let the vendor manage delivery end-to-end. It’s often used for IT support, infrastructure management, legacy system maintenance, or testing-as-a-service.

This model is efficient for well-defined, repeatable tasks where you don’t want internal involvement. However, it offers minimal visibility, flexibility, or control over how work is done.

By contrast, team extension keeps ownership and direction in your hands. You’re hiring people who become part of your internal rhythm, not delegating responsibility for the outcome to a third party. If you’re a product company that values rapid iteration, changing requirements, and engineering culture, team extension aligns far better with your needs than a managed service contract.

This leads many founders to ask, Which model offers the best balance between cost and control? If you’re optimizing for hands-off execution and budget certainty, managed services can be efficient. But if you’re focused on agility, real-time collaboration, and IP retention, team extension gives you more control without sacrificing cost-effectiveness.

Team Extension vs. Freelance Hiring

Freelancers—especially those sourced via platforms like Upwork or Fiverr—are often hired for specific tasks, modules, or one-off deliverables. They’re cost-efficient and can be highly skilled, but they’re also independent by design. Freelancers tend to work solo, juggle multiple clients, and operate without deep integration into your internal team.

This model is ideal for low-risk, non-core development (like landing pages, integration scripts, or prototyping). But it falls short when you need a reliable, full-time contributor who participates in team discussions, long-term roadmapping, and system architecture.

A common question here is: Why not just hire a few freelancers instead of extending my team? The answer lies in cohesion, continuity, and commitment. Freelancers may churn, miss team context, or be unavailable when needed. Team extension gives you stable, embedded engineers who evolve with your product and culture.

Each outsourcing model has its place. Staff augmentation helps with short-term gaps. Managed services are efficient for predefined outcomes. Dedicated teams are great for isolated systems. Freelancers are fast and flexible for solo tasks.

But if you’re building a product that requires long-term ownership, team collaboration, and engineering maturity, then the team extension model offers the strongest combination of control, scalability, and alignment.

By choosing the right model for the right stage, you avoid common outsourcing pitfalls and maximize the value of your external talent. Team extension isn’t about replacing your team—it’s about thoughtfully enhancing it.

What are the benefits of team extension?

There are many benefits you get as a result of team extension. These benefits include the following:

When it comes to managing any tech development team, one of the significant aspects to consider is the ability to scale the team. The hiring and screening processes can be time-consuming and daunting, especially when you want to extend your team. Besides, your business or project might require some experts with specific skill sets, and this can be hard to find. In such instances, team extension is the most viable solution since your main focus is on the values and skills the team extension adds to your business as a whole.

Among the key elements that escalated the success of a project is effective communication among the teams. Improper or misinterpretation of information can make the whole project go down, and this means wasting time and other valuable resources. With the extension team models, communication is quite clear between the extended team and the team handling the project. Besides, both teams are skillful and understand clearly the plans, requirements, and dynamics of the project at hand.

With the extension model, your business is open to experts from across the globe. You not only depend on the local talents but extend your search to international markets until you get the exact experts you need to fill the existing gap in your team. This not only enhances the flow of the projects but also ensures you get quality results afterward.

Share responsibility will not only motivate your employees but also ensure high-quality work is delivered even when the deadline is tighter. Besides, shared responsibility gives all the teams a sense of teamwork and collaboration to promote a seamless process of product development.

In any business setup, especially when dealing with employees, there are always those hidden costs that one may not realize. For instance, employee benefits, office supplies & requirements, and other miscellaneous charges. These hidden expenses often escalate within a short time frame, and with time, you can realize how heavily you have spent on a given project.

With the team extension model, there are no hidden expenses. You simply agree with the extended team on terms of payments and the overall fee required for the whole process. Therefore, you can easily track and manage all your expenses, ensuring your business is financially healthy.

A project that isn’t well managed is likely to flop. Still, improper project management can lead to a waste of materials and time and frequently missing deadlines. This can be inappropriate for the business and can lead to business failure.

With the team extension model, you can assign a project manager the task of overseeing the progress of the work, or you can choose to oversee the project’s progress by yourself. In any case, the project management process in the team extension model is highly flexible, seamless, and transparent, ensuring all the details are covered appropriately.

As the tech world keeps advancing, the need for fresh and innovative ideas for any product and service delivery also grows. An extension team model makes it possible to channel professionals and experts to an already existing team. These professionals come with creative and innovative ideas that can push the project to the next level, ensuring you stay ahead of the competitive market.

What are the team extension model challenges?

While team extension offers a wide range of benefits, especially in relation to project management, the same model also possesses some challenges, as described below:

Sometimes, it may take a while before the extended team blends and starts walking toward the same objective as the already existing team. This can vary based on the communication skills and leadership styles adopted by the existing team. If your existing team feels at home, then the extended team will blend in perfectly; both teams can collaborate and work together smoothly. However, if the already existing team feels unmotivated, the extended team might feel the pressure of working in such an environment. In any case, ensure you highlight the requirements and objectives clearly to both teams to avoid pitfalls along the way.

With the team extension model, you can source top talents from anywhere across the globe. While this exposes you to top talents who will bring value to your business in one way or another, it can impact the performance of both teams, especially when the cultural practices are different.

For instance, if your existing team is fluent in English while the extended team struggles with English, it can be tough for the two teams to collaborate effectively.

Before you get the right team, it takes time resources, and requires you to be extra attentive. Of course, you will find as many extended teams as you can to add to your team. However, the complexity comes in when you have to define the exact needs of your company, and you have to figure out the appropriate team that will fit it. In fact, you might need to hire business analysis at an extra cost to guide you in selecting the extended team that will add value to your business.

Especially if you want instant results, the team extension model might not be appropriate for you and your business. There are many elements you must factor in to ensure the whole process is seamless and worth the effort. If not well-calculated and planned, you might spend more time hiring and integrating extended teams into your existing team.

When to use the team extension model

Not all instances are appropriate for team extension. Below are some common instances when the team extension model works appropriately:

How to Choose the Right Team Extension Partner

Selecting the right team extension partner is a critical decision that can determine the long-term success—or failure—of your engineering roadmap. While the team extension model offers flexibility, speed, and access to global talent, these benefits only materialize if you choose a vendor who is technically competent, strategically aligned, and operationally mature. Many companies begin by asking, What questions should I ask a team extension provider before hiring them? The answer starts with a structured evaluation framework.

1. Technical Fit and Industry Expertise

Before anything else, the vendor must demonstrate hands-on experience with the technologies and platforms you use. Whether your stack includes React, Node.js, Python, Kubernetes, or niche tools like GraphQL or WebRTC, your extended team should be able to contribute with minimal training.

Go beyond resumes and portfolios. Ask for:

But tech skills alone aren’t enough. You also need domain knowledge. For example, if you’re building a SaaS product for healthcare, a team with prior HIPAA-compliant system experience will ramp up faster and avoid costly mistakes. If you’re in fintech, you want a team that understands data security, latency-sensitive systems, and regulatory boundaries.

2. Language, Time Zone, and Cultural Compatibility

Even the best developers can become ineffective if they can’t communicate clearly or collaborate smoothly. That’s why language proficiency—particularly in spoken and written English—is essential. During discovery calls, pay close attention to how well the vendor understands your needs, asks clarifying questions, and articulates their value.

Time zone alignment is another factor often underestimated. Ask yourself:

Cultural fit also matters, especially if your internal team values specific rituals like retrospectives, async documentation, or direct feedback. Misalignments in work ethic, hierarchy, or conflict resolution can erode trust. Look for vendors who already serve clients in your region or industry—they’re more likely to adapt seamlessly.

3. Onboarding Practices and Ramp-Up Speed

A well-run vendor will have a structured onboarding process that goes beyond introductions and laptop setup. They should help integrate their developers into your team’s:

Ask them to walk you through their typical onboarding timeline. How long does it take for a new engineer to become fully productive? What do they need from your side (documentation, design systems, access credentials) to avoid bottlenecks?

This is also the right moment to explore their knowledge management practices. Do they use internal wikis? Is documentation part of their dev culture? These things determine how quickly new team members can pick up context if you decide to scale.

4. Reference Checks, Client History, and Transparency

A credible team extension provider should voluntarily offer references from current or past clients. Don’t just ask for logos—get actual contact details and reach out. Ask those clients:

You should also look at:

Transparency is a strong indicator of professionalism. Are their pricing models and engagement terms clearly stated? Do they have an open hiring process and clear role definitions? If a provider is vague or deflects detailed questions, it’s a red flag.

5. Red Flags to Watch For

While interviewing providers, be alert to warning signs that may signal deeper operational or cultural issues:

One subtle but important red flag is when a provider doesn’t ask you many questions. A good partner should be deeply curious about your workflows, goals, risks, and expectations. If the discussion feels one-sided, the engagement probably will be too.

What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring?

To filter for fit and reliability, ask direct and operationally relevant questions like:

These questions test not just capability, but also operational maturity and cultural alignment—which are often more predictive of success than raw technical skill.

Choosing the right team extension partner isn’t just about filling a role. It’s about selecting a group that will function as a true extension of your company—technically proficient, communicatively fluent, and strategically aligned. If the partner checks all the boxes in this framework, you’re far more likely to achieve seamless integration, accelerated delivery, and long-term engineering success.

Steps to follow to ensure successful integration of the extended team into the existing team

Once you have figured out that you need to integrate an extended team into an already existing team, there are rules, tips, and measures you should take to ensure the whole process turns out successfully. The rules include the following:

Based on the dynamic of your business, define the goals and roles you expect the extended team to achieve. Next, ensure your existing team lacks the required skills and knowledge required to scale the project. Once you are clear here, with the assistance of an experienced web development company, you can establish the steps to integrate the extended model into your team.

Next, set up the rules and requirements for the project. This will enable you to present these details to the right team as you search for the appropriate extended team for your project. These requirements and goals will ensure you get the appropriate team that will meet all the objectives of your business. Here, market research is quite crucial to ensure you streamline the process effectively.

With the project’s requirements and goals in place, you can begin the screening process until you get the right team to integrate with your already existing team. Make sure the team has all the relevant tech and soft skills required to enhance the integration of both teams.

This is the most crucial step in the whole process of hiring through the team extension model. You must be careful and pay attention to details. All the extended team members must be familiar with the plans, requirements, and processes of the project at hand. Introduce the new teams to the existing team as you give an overview of the operational processes, technologies used, and the policies governing your business culture.

Why Choose Aalpha for Team Extension?

Aalpha stands out as a trusted partner for businesses seeking high-performance team extension solutions. With over 15 years of experience delivering complex software projects across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia, Aalpha brings a rare combination of technical depth, domain expertise, and cultural alignment. Whether you need to scale your backend team, onboard React developers quickly, or add DevOps capacity, Aalpha provides pre-vetted engineers who integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows.

Our developers don’t just work for you—they work with you. Every engagement is designed around full transparency, agile collaboration, and long-term continuity. From enforcing airtight NDAs and IP clauses to aligning with your preferred tools, CI/CD practices, and sprint rituals, Aalpha ensures that your extended team functions as a true extension of your in-house engineering team.

If you’re looking for a reliable team extension partner that prioritizes quality, security, and delivery velocity—Aalpha is the right choice.

Security, IP Protection, and Regulatory Compliance

When extending your software development team to a third-party provider or offshore partner, security and intellectual property (IP) protection become non-negotiable. While extended teams can deliver speed, flexibility, and global expertise, they also introduce new vulnerabilities—especially around data access, code confidentiality, and compliance. One of the most common concerns among CTOs and founders is: How do I make sure my extended team can’t leak our source code?

The key is to treat security not as a one-time legal checkbox, but as a layered strategy combining legal safeguards, access controls, compliance adherence, and operational hygiene.

1. Enforce NDAs and Define IP Ownership Contractually

The legal foundation of any team extension partnership should include:

These clauses must specify that:

A properly structured Master Services Agreement (MSA) and Statement of Work (SOW) should leave no ambiguity. Also ensure the vendor’s local legal jurisdiction recognizes the enforceability of IP laws—and avoid providers who are unwilling to bind individual developers via NDA.

2. Control Data and Code Access With Secure Tools

Legal contracts alone don’t prevent leaks or unauthorized access. That’s where technical access controls come in. Best practices include:

In addition, implement logging and audit trails for all repositories, systems, and environments. If something goes wrong, you need to know who did what and when.

3. Ensure Compliance With Global Regulatory Standards

Depending on your market and data type, you may be subject to strict regulatory frameworks. These require not only process discipline but also vendor-level compliance.

Ask for compliance documentation or evidence—such as audit logs, training records, or security policies. A serious partner will already have these prepared.

4. Handle Developer Offboarding With Precision

One overlooked security risk is poor offboarding. Even if developers leave on good terms, retaining access to your systems after exit can expose you to serious threats.

Best-practice offboarding includes:

Ideally, you’ll automate access control through centralized identity providers like Okta, Google Workspace, or Azure AD, which allow for one-click offboarding.

5. Real-World Example: Source Code Leak and Prevention

A US-based startup once outsourced a portion of their front-end work to a small offshore firm. They skipped NDA enforcement for individual contractors and granted full access to the production repository. Months later, a competitor launched an identical feature—using their UI components and animations almost verbatim.

The root cause? A freelance developer from the offshore vendor copied parts of the codebase to a personal GitHub repo after offboarding. Because the company didn’t revoke access promptly and had no monitoring logs, they couldn’t track the breach or take legal action.

After that incident, the startup restructured their access control strategy using:

The breach didn’t happen again.

Security in team extension is about proactive governance, not reactive recovery. If you define ownership clearly, control access tightly, adhere to compliance standards, and offboard with discipline, you drastically reduce the risk of IP loss, data breach, or regulatory violations.

When choosing a team extension provider, don’t just ask about coding skills—ask how they protect your business. If they can’t show security policies, NDA templates, or compliance documentation, they aren’t ready to be your partner.

How much does it cost to hire a team extension?

While team extension is an incredible way to solve most of your project’s challenges, it can be hard to approximate the exact cost you will incur. This is because the processes vary depending on a number of elements. Among the top factors include the following:

An extended team from the USA will attract more charges than an extended team from Asia. The pricing model variations are always a result of living costs and access to improved technologies and resources that will scale the business higher. You only need to ensure you get the right team that will add value to your business as a whole.

Of course, a highly experienced extended team will attract more charges than a team that is just beginning. Therefore, based on your budget and business dynamics, choose a team that will deliver exclusively within your budget.

If your project is quite large, you might need to add more talents to the already existing team to escalate the whole process. Therefore, the bigger the extended team, the more you will spend on the extended team.

Does your project require special experts? A more complex project will require you to add many experts to make the process successful. This, therefore, will mean spending more on extended teams. You can always get in touch with Aalpha Information Systems, India, for a quote for your team extension requirements.

Future Trends in Team Extension and Distributed Engineering

As engineering organizations evolve in an AI-first, remote-first world, the software team extension model is undergoing significant transformation. While the core concept—augmenting internal teams with external engineers—remains intact, the way companies source, manage, and integrate extended teams is shifting fast. Founders and CTOs are increasingly asking, Is team extension still relevant in the age of AI? and Will AI replace offshore developers? The answer lies in understanding how the model is adapting to new technological realities and team structures.

1. AI-Powered Developers and Copilot Tools

The rise of AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Codeium, Sourcegraph Cody, and Replit Ghostwriter has changed how developers approach software development. These tools assist with boilerplate code, generate functions, suggest fixes, and even explain legacy systems. Rather than replacing developers, AI tools are becoming co-pilots that accelerate productivity.

In extended teams, this dynamic has even greater impact. Offshore and remote engineers who may lack full product context can now onboard faster, ask fewer repetitive questions, and deliver higher-quality code through real-time AI assistance. Copilots help reduce onboarding friction and allow developers in distributed environments to catch up quickly without overwhelming internal team members.

So when someone asks, Will AI replace offshore developers?—the reality is that AI will amplify the effectiveness of all developers, regardless of geography. It’s not replacing teams—it’s raising the baseline and enabling distributed models to operate more efficiently.

2. The Rise of Hybrid Global Teams

Instead of choosing between a fully in-house team or a fully offshore one, companies are increasingly adopting hybrid global models. These involve internal teams working side-by-side with extended teams in different regions, synchronized through agile workflows, daily standups, and collaborative platforms.

In this new normal, integration takes precedence over outsourcing. Team extension providers must embed their developers into clients’ communication rhythms, tooling stacks, and cultural norms. The emphasis is on tight alignment—not just technical skill.

Companies now prioritize team extension partners who can adapt quickly to internal rituals, participate in real-time decision-making, and contribute as first-class team members. What matters more than cost or location is how well the external team can integrate into the product’s development lifecycle.

3. AI-Native Workflows and Developer Tooling

Modern software teams—especially those working across time zones—are adopting AI-native tools that minimize bottlenecks and reduce reliance on synchronous communication. Tools like Sourcegraph Cody allow developers to search codebases semantically, understand architecture quickly, and get natural-language explanations of code.

Meanwhile, Codeium and similar tools embed AI directly into development environments (like VS Code or JetBrains), enabling intelligent auto-completion, debugging suggestions, and refactoring support. These capabilities are particularly useful in team extension setups, where developers may be new to the domain or codebase and need to ramp up fast.

The shift toward AI-native tooling makes it easier to onboard extended teams, maintain code quality, and minimize delays due to distributed working conditions.

So, is team extension still relevant in the age of AI? Without question. If anything, the emergence of AI tools has made it easier to onboard, train, and collaborate with distributed developers—lowering the barriers to global team extension.

The future of team extension lies not in geography but in alignment, tooling, and culture. AI won’t eliminate the need for extended teams—it will make them smarter, faster, and more integrated. Companies that embrace this shift—investing in both global talent and AI-enabled workflows—will build engineering teams that are not just distributed, but truly collaborative.

Conclusion

There are many ways to scale your software development business. Once you realize the need for adding extra talents and skill force, you can always consider the team extension model for the effectiveness of your project. Use the processes described in this guide, and you will never go wrong with team extension.

FAQs on Team Extension

1. What is a team extension model?

The team extension model is a flexible outsourcing approach where external professionals are integrated into an existing in-house team to fill specific skill gaps or scale capacity. Unlike traditional outsourcing, where a project is handled entirely by a vendor, team extension ensures direct collaboration between your internal staff and the augmented developers. This model is ideal for long-term projects requiring tight alignment and control over deliverables.

2. How is team extension different from dedicated teams or outsourcing?

While both team extension and dedicated teams involve remote staffing, the key difference lies in integration. A team extension resource becomes a virtual part of your in-house team, working under your project management, communication tools, and development workflows. In contrast, outsourcing or dedicated team models often function independently, with more autonomy and vendor-driven project oversight.

3. When should a business consider using team extension services?

Companies should consider team extension when:

4. What roles can be filled through a team extension model?

Virtually any technical role can be filled, including:

5. How does team extension work in practice?

Once a requirement is shared, the service provider shortlists and presents vetted candidates who match your needs. After selection, the extended team member(s) start working under your management, adhering to your preferred communication channels, tools (e.g., Jira, GitHub, Slack), and work hours (with overlapping time zones if needed). The vendor handles payroll, HR, and infrastructure while you maintain full control over deliverables and team alignment.

6. How secure is it to extend your team with offshore or nearshore developers?

Security and IP protection depend on choosing a trusted provider with robust legal agreements, secure development environments, and transparent workflows. Look for companies offering:

7. What are the benefits of using a team extension model?

Key advantages include:

8. What tools and platforms are commonly used in a team extension setup?

To maintain transparency and seamless collaboration, companies usually use:

9. Can I scale up or down the team as needed?

Yes. One of the biggest strengths of the team extension model is flexibility. Most providers allow you to scale your team up or down with 2–4 weeks’ notice, depending on contractual terms. This makes it ideal for project-based hiring or managing unpredictable development loads.

10. How do you ensure the quality and productivity of extended team members?

Quality assurance typically involves:

11. How much does a team extension service cost?

Rates vary by geography, skill level, and contract duration. For example:

12. What industries benefit most from the team extension model?

Industries with high digital product demands such as fintech, healthtech, e-commerce, SaaS, logistics, and edtech benefit significantly. These sectors often require rapid iteration, evolving skill needs, and compliance-aware builds—all of which align with the strengths of a team extension approach.

Finally, to know more – consider connecting with offshore development center!

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