Product maintenance for an American client for 3 years

Shinetech responsibility: product maintenance, new functions development, modules development, bug fixing
Cooperation: started in 2007
Team size: 6 developers
Project management tool: Basecamp
Technologies: Struts, Spring, Hibernate, EJB

Client's situation

This is an American software company which focuses on delivering professional IT solutions for bank industry. One of their main products is an e-payment system which has been on sale for years.

To reduce the system development cost, the client looked at offshore outsourcing. What it wanted is a stable team of good self - organizers with strong technology capability to obtain the highest cost efficiency.

Roles and responsibility

There is an internal team of business analysts, PM and developers on the client’s side which are familiar with the product. In order to reduce the offshore development risks, and enhance the control upon the whole outsourcing process, the client’s internal team is responsible for business requirement research/gathering and transferring it to high level business requirement, and the development of the core part: data security as well.

Shinetech team consisted of 1 SA/lead developer, 5 developers, working as an efficient expansion of the client’s internal team. Their responsibility is product maintenance, new functions development, completing tasks assigned by the client every day.

Challenges

Complex system architecture – in initial phase of the collaboration, over 20 ANT projects needed to be integrated together, and several J2EE frameworks were used,

Cooperation

12 hours time zone difference: the client locates in East America where the working hours is completely opposite with us. The PM of Shinetech team is available for at least two hours every day on client’s working time, to make sure they made the right understanding of the requirement and then correct the wrong development. She says: “I must make sure that today’s tasks have been really completed. “

Free charge for overtime requirement communication: in the first year of collaboration, lot of time was spent in requirement analysis/communication internally and externally with the client.

Efficiency is three times increased: with the growing understanding of client’s business and the e-payment system, the efficiency of each person were improved, especially for the PM, who has been served for the client for 3 three years to date, the current work she complete every day is equal to that of three developers two years ago.

The latest status of the cooperation in June 2010: the team was down to 1 developer in the middle year of 2009 for economic crisis, and it kept that until recently, the client plans to enlarge the team again, we are glad to see that the client has pulled through the economic crisis and grows well. [an error occurred while processing this directive]