Customer Solution Case Study
New Solution Cuts Development Time by 10 Percent, Increases Developer Productivity by 15 Percent
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Business Process Outsourcing
Customer Profile
Founded in 1986, Sutherland Global Services is world’s leading provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) services for more than 22 years and operates in multiple delivery centers across United States, India, Philippines, and Canada. It is an IT enabled and BPO company specializing in customer management and back-office services.
Business Situation
Sutherland used an internally developed application to manage its business requirements, which hampered the company’s ability to follow agile software development principles.
Solution
The company developed a new application using Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 including Visual Studio® 2008 Team Foundation Server giving the company an integrated solution for all aspects of application lifecycle management.
Benefits
n Reduces development time by 10 percent
n Improves software quality
n Provides better communication and collaboration
n Increases developer productivity by 15 percent
n Enhances visibility of information
n Enables standalone development / “Visual Studio® Team System 2008 was a fully packed application, a one stop solution for application development. It has the agility along with better control and visibility that improves productivity and quality assurance with limited manpower and cost.”
Sridhar Chokkappa, Chief Project Manager, Sutherland Global Services
Over 22 years since inception, Sutherland Global Services is an international provider of business process outsourcing services. The company is among the largest in the industry, with more than 22,000 employees worldwide. To facilitate its business requirements, Sutherland was using an internally developed application, which resulted in a drain on productivity, software quality issues, and suboptimal communication. Seeking a solution, Sutherland deployed Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008, including Visual Studio® 2008 Team Foundation Server. Today, the company is benefiting from a more consistent and streamlined application lifecycle, increased productivity, improved software quality, and better communication – all leading to increased customer satisfaction.
Situation
Sutherland Global Services is a multinational IT enabled and business process outsourcing (BPO) company, specializing in integrated BPO solutions across customer lifecycle and back-office lifecycle management services. Having started operations in 1986 in Rochester, New York, Sutherland now employs over 22,000 professionals offering RightSourced seamlessly blended services from its 22 delivery centers in India, the United States, Philippines, Eastern Europe, Canada and Mexico.
Sutherland has a worldwide client base that includes Fortune 1000 and Fortune 500 companies. Its clients are from various industry verticals including retail, insurance, mortgage, banking, healthcare, telecommunications, technology, and travel and hospitality. Some of its clients are AT&T, Xerox, Amazon, HP, Dell, Intuit, and Gateway.
By integrating highly trained people with state-of-the-art technology and proven business methodologies, Sutherland collaborates with clients to help them excel in their industry and maximize their customer lifetime value. “With the help of our expert services, knowledge, and tools, our clients can focus on their core competence and improve customer facing operations,” says Sridhar Chokkappa, Chief Project Manager, Sutherland.
Sutherland relied on a custom software application to facilitate all its business needs. The system required the employees to manually track data in Excel sheets. In addition, backup and version maintenance was also done manually. Developers had little visibility into the testing process, which was again manual.
The five year old software was showing its age. Lack of an integrated tool set to support the company’s application lifecycle management strategy was presenting several problems and thus the development team was facing challenges including:
n Difficult source code version management and build management process
n No standard repository across board resulting in different manual methods of maintenance
n Non-distributed development environment resulting in a situation where a developer needs to wait for the other developer to correct the compilation error before testing the code
n Lack of visibility into project status
As the complexity surrounding its business and applications grew, the company realized that it needed to migrate to a new, service-based IT architecture that would meet new demands.
“We were eager to find a solution to our problems as we were frustrated with our current way of doing things,” says Sridhar. “We needed a comprehensive, enterprise-class solution for managing all aspects of the development process.”
Solution
Sutherland evaluated a number of potential solutions including solutions from TortoiseSVN and other open source tools. Finally, it deployed Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 including Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 Team Foundation Server.
Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 is an integrated application lifecycle management solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance to help all team members improve their skills and work more effectively together. It includes a number of elements that IT vendors can select according to the scope of their development requirements.
Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 Team Foundation Server, a core component of Visual Studio Team System, is a collaboration server that offers a number of functions including source code control, work-item and issue tracking, integrated process guidance, project health, and status reporting. It provides a central repository for project data to foster better team communication and provide project stakeholders with deep visibility into all aspects of the software development process and life cycle.
Sutherland selected Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 for a number of reasons including:
n Source safe integration with current Visual Studio IDE that the company was already using
n An integrated tool with complete project management capabilities; provides a one stop solution for all the company’s needs
n Ease of customization
n Support from Microsoft for the implementation
“Visual Studio® Team System 2008 was a fully packed application, a one stop solution for application development,” says Sridhar Chokkappa. “It has the agility along with better control and visibility that improves productivity and quality assurance with limited manpower and cost.”
Solution Overview
To facilitate a transparent database development process, Sutherland designed a solution to implement Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 Team Foundation Server, an enterprise-grade collaboration server. The solution is developed to take care of source control, task management, Web testing, process templates, build and reporting.
It is architected to enable rapid development that suits internal software creation, independent development with seamless integration of source code, and task assignment linked with change set and Web testing. Additionally, it also takes care of code profiling and process template customization to include internal reporting parameters and internal processes.
The Design Approach
The new application provides a sophisticated user-driven approach to model business processes and workflows.
Sutherland took advantage of the new Application Designer that gives architects the flexibility to continuously define and configure new features and functionality to the design surface. The Application Designer dynamically enables architects to define and develop design models even when some information may be missing.
Team System source control integrated with Web testing along with automated periodic team builds is another key functionality among other features of VSTS, which benefited Sutherland immensely. Source control integration reduced the inter dependency during development and also enabled isolation development with perfect integration. It has greatly reduced the effort put on development testing by introducing integrated Web testing.
Sutherland took advantage of the following features in Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008:
n Comprehensive Version Control: Visual Studio Team System contains a powerful version control system that is tightly integrated with the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. This system provides functionality common to most source control management systems like checking, checkout, branching, and merging.
n Detailed Work Plans: Work item tracking in Visual Studio Team System provides an efficient way to manage and monitor the status of all project-related activities. All projects have detailed work plans, with initial work items generated automatically based on process templates.
n Powerful Build Server: Version control in Visual Studio Team System is complemented by its Team Build features, including support for continuous integration builds every time someone checks in code. Unit tests and build verification tests can be run as part of the process, and if the build or tests fail, designated stakeholders are automatically notified.
n Business Intelligence for Development Teams: The business intelligence features in Visual Studio Team System provide the information needed to make informed, real-time decisions with just a click on a link. And because SQL Server Reporting Services is the engine underlying Visual Studio Team System business intelligence, teams can just as easily customize existing reports as they can create new ones.
Implementation Overview
The project started in August 2008 and it took about five months for the implementation as it requires more ground work before implementation. The implementation happened in Chennai, the global development centre of Sutherland.
The following unique requirements were addressed during implementation:
n Integration of work item with internal task management system: Work item tracking provided an efficient way to manage the efforts of all team members, with full traceability back to initial project goals and real-time visibility into team progress.
n Using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) for Sutherland specific reports: Coupled with the data warehouse maintaining statistics and work item history, the solution helped to generate specific reports. The platform allowed the team members to gather information with various levels of granularity.
Some of the key customizations include change in work item template to include Sutherland specific fields. Sutherland internally has different factors associated with the activity that developers perform such as, internal help desk ticket number, change request identification, etc. This information is critical for reporting, and costing purposes. It was thus imperative to add these to enable reporting. Customizing these work items is now a quick and simple activity in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
Sutherland is also using Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 as a central data repository for its new application. SQL Server® 2005 gives the capability to move data faster and more securely across the system, which leads to a better customer experience.
The new platform eliminates redundancies and dramatically increases efficiencies, leading to greater productivity and profitability.
Benefits
With Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008, the development group is increasing its productivity, improving its ability to manage the application life cycle, and increasing software quality. “Our main objective was to increase productivity, manageability and quality with reduction in turnaround time and manpower,” explains Sridhar. “The new solution helps us achieve these.”
Reduces Development Time by 10 Percent
“By creating an application and using the tools in Visual Studio® Team System 2008, we have reduced 10 percent of the time to develop the new solution,” comments Sridhar.
Working with Visual Studio® Team System 2008, developers noticed immediate process improvement through automation, which in turn helped then to significantly reduce development time.
For example, it improves productivity by reducing the time that developers spend in taking backups; and waiting period for developers to complete their tasks, in case of a centralized approach.
Improves Software Quality
VSTS improves manageability by maintaining versions, changesets and automated builds.
Software quality is improved because the new development environment helps team members to detect potential errors earlier in the project life cycle. The company’s use of Team Foundation Server to integrate unit and regression testing into the daily build process has resulted in higher software quality and less rework, leading to faster QA cycles and increased internal customer satisfaction.
Provides Better Communication and Collaboration
Sutherland enhanced collaboration among developers, analysts, and other stakeholders by using Visual Studio® Team System 2008. “Having all project data in one place is improving team collaboration by helping to keep everyone informed of project status,” says Sridhar.
The company is also taking advantage of Visual Studio® Team System 2008 to improve communication with clients, keeping them fully informed of project status, quality, and speed of delivery.
Increases Developer Productivity by 15 Percent
With Visual Studio® Team System 2008 and Visual Studio® 2008 Team Foundation Server project managers work with more up-to-date project assets. Team Foundation Server allows developers to be more efficient during all phases of the software development lifecycle.
“Since deploying the solution, developer productivity has increased by 15 percent,” says Sridhar. “This enormous rise in productivity is because developers now have all the information they need at their fingertips.”
Enhances Visibility of Information
Team Foundation Server acts as a data warehouse that collects real-time intelligence on project history, such as project status. This new transparency enables the developers to respond quickly to obstacles impeding progress.
“We’re now able to see precise information about all the activities involved in a project,” says Sridhar. “The solution helps us work as an integrated team; everyone knows what everyone else is doing.”
Enables Standalone Development
Prior to the implementation of Team Foundation Server, Sutherland had a Web server hosting the development, which was accessed by multiple developers. It stored and compiled the code in the server memory. When one developer tried to debug the error in one of the pages, others had to wait for the build to succeed to test the code changes. The load was thus on the development server.
However, in the new solution, developers download the source files, check-out the required files, compile application in the local machine, see results in the local machine, and finally check-in the changed file. This results in independent development, saving lots of development time. It also reduces the dependency on the development server.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world's most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced with Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft Expression® Suite. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio