Introduction
Backed by 189 years of domain experience, the client is a leading provider of logistics management software to fortune 500 clients and medium sized oil and gas companies. As a part of its initiative to revamp business operations for potential growth, the client wanted to team up with a trustworthy IT partner capable of providing expert resources, to cater to its product development & QA needs.
Need
Owing to its exceptional growth prospects in other geographies, the client required a complete overhauling of business processes. Significantly large enhancements needed to be developed & incorporated in the existing system to meet diverse business requirements of supply chain management. Rigorous QA of the developed product was yet another important requirement of the client.
Following client requirements led to the setting up of an offshore development center in Noida:
- Specialized resources equipped with the latest tools & technologies and the ability to quickly grasp the intricacies of the client’s business domain to reduce the load on client engineers.
- Ability to work according to directed guidelines with design and architecture responsibility still retained by the client.
- Ability to understand the challenges faced by end users of the system.
- Ability to take ownership of risk for both product development & QA and ensure upon capacity paid for, by the client.
- Dedicated QA environment different from the production environment to avoid obstructing the working of the existing application in case of frequent releases.
Solution
Contata established an Offshore Development Center (ODC) in Noida that acted as a virtual extension of the client’s in-house development environment. Noida ODC caters to the application development, application management, and application testing needs of the client.
The salient features of the solution include:
- Development team comprising of 4 professionals proficient in .Net technology & SQL server to rebuild the existing system.
- QA team comprising of 4 professionals proficient in testing skills with hands-on experience in Test Link to create test cases and Cruise for automated build deployment.
- Quick ramping up of resources on the client’s business domain.
- Initiation workshops & meetings for understanding the existing system and culture at the client side.
- Standardized procedure for communicating requirements to the development team.
- Performing Unit testing on application code to validate the code and functional testing on the web application to ensure a stable system to be able to work under load.
- Reporting status of the project to develop leads on the client side via daily status reports.
- Weekly meetings conducted between development leads on-site & development teams offshore to keep a track of the progress of the project.
Advantages
The client leveraged the following benefits by outsourcing its development & QA activities to Noida ODC:
- Time to focus on other core business processes to rapidly enhance its technical competence.
- Smooth integration of product enhancements into the production environment as a result of QA.
- Dedicated attention to the application leading to a quality product.
- Instruction time & effort narrowed down to a minimum owing to Contata’s sound understanding of the client’s product.
- Seamless maintenance of client product.
- Ready-to-use resources, reduced development time & huge internal savings.
- Risk factor mitigated as Contata assumes the entire risk for capacity & quality of the product.
- Long-term relationships built based on clients’ trust in Contata and its services.
- Total cost of ownership reduced due to streamlined & transparent processes.
- Short-term augmentation needs taken care by Contata thus saving upon the client’s cost, time & effort to employ & train the resources.