Office Automation Product for an AU Client

Keywords:limited money, investment back in very short term, iterative and incremental development, office automation system, .NET, AJAX, SaaS, Crystal Report,ad reseller, 3 years' cooperation

AccountAbility is a start-up who planned to build a SaaS product for ad resellers to do business in a convenient and cost-effective way; the core idea is office automation. The customer had a clear vision of the features required for the office automation system, but worried about the limited money invested, he sought assistance with a reasonable solution to get the investment back in very short term.

According to the customer's requirement, Shinetech team suggested to:

• make priorities on the business requirement, define the scope of the product V1 within the budget.
• put as small money as possible on the QA with basic quality requirement met, so to leave enough money for essential functions development.
• adopt iterative and incremental development; we made it a iteration for every 2~3 weeks, with workable and integrated deliveries, for the customer to check whether the product was built as expected.

The ideas were fully carried out: we founded a team with 4 developers and 1 tester; the customer got the product V1 within the first year, he put it into market. With the earned money, the customer moved forward with the product V2 and V3 development.

Though there is only one tester involved, we delivered the required quality. Developers understand what the goal is. Various testing methods were used, unit testing, automated testing, and even manual testing. Whatever the method was, each guy made successful integrations in iterations. Also, they always coded in compliance with the code criteria.

The customer sometimes receives bugs from the end users, which are usually fixed within four hours to minimize the impact by the strong support of the Shinetech team.

Now, the product has made good sales. The customer keeps one fully working developer for product maintenance.