Client:
Worldwide management consulting firm.
Business Need:
The client had issues with the quality of their biggest application being developed by a third party vendor. The product owner was very angry at seeing issues in the product, especially the ones that made it into production, since it was giving a black eye to the team and the company’s brand. The client’s support team for the product was very nervous about utilizing new features in the product on new projects because they did not trust the quality of the development team’s efforts.
Why Did This Need Exist:
- There were bugs in the system that were found in production that should have been caught in development.
- In developing new features, some were not fully developed while other features were being impacted negatively on accident.
- There was no effective process on how to handle level three support issues coming in from case teams utilizing the software in the field.
How Geneca Helped this Management Consulting Firm:
We provided full product delivery (project management, business analysts, user experience, architecture, developers, and QA) for the product to improve overall delivery.
We created a mix of on-shore and off-shore quality analysists to balance reaction time and costs for our client.
We created a regression testing matrix to improve overall product quality before release to case teams.
We conducted holistic regression of the system to iron out the current state of the product when the code was taken over to uncover any broken features in the application.
We created automated testing and build processes to remove manual issues for repeatable items.
The first time a major client of theirs was having problems with the tool after we took over, we stepped in to set up a proper triage and resolution process without being asked. We saw the gap in their capabilities and stepped in to manage the situation for the overall success of the project and client. We were able to give the client visibility of the chaos happening and put them in control of the solution.
The Results:
Improved quality reduced the issues seen in production, improving confidence in the tool for the users and allowing the support team to handle larger numbers of cases.
Improved support process allows for better response times and clarity of changes in hot fixes by their support team when cases do run into issues.
Why it’s Cool:
Bugs in code remove the user’s trust in a system and can be difficult to recover from. Being able to take a mature product and retrofit quality into it was a great win for the product team. The product owner was much happier that she could trust new releases of the software wouldn’t adversely color her company’s reputation. The support team was happy that they could trust the quality of the tool and push forward with new releases and features without second guessing if they may fail in production.
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