Customer Solution Case Study
/ iQmetrix enhances development processes with the help of Visual Studio 2010
Overview
Country or Region: Canada
Industry: Technology
Customer Profile
iQmetrix is the premier provider of retail management solutions for the cellular and wireless industry.
Business Situation
iQmetrix is constantly challenged with managing multiple custom built applications for customers in a variety of environments resulting in a slow development process and inefficient team coordination.
Solution
iQmetrix commissioned the help of Imaginet to streamline processes and reduce timelines with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010.
Benefits
Enhanced project management ca
Enhanced productivity
More effective development / “Our customers rely on our software to run their business but their cost margins are small and the technology is always changing which makes our solution so much more than a simple point of sale.”
Ken Konkel, Team Lead of Core Development, iQmetrix
As the premier provider of retail management solutions for the cellular and wireless industry, iQmetrix is challenged with bringing their next-generation RQ4 product to market while undergoing substantial customer and development team growth.
iQmetrix knew it was time for a change and engaged Imaginet to install Microsoft Team Foundation Server ®2010 and assist in the development of best practices while increasing productivity and reducing management time required for multiple development tools.
Situation
As the premier provider of retail management solutions for the cellular and wireless industry, iQmetrix manages multiple custom-built solutions for customers and offers an enterprise management solution for cellular and wireless industry customers.
“Our customers rely on our software to run their businesses but their cost margins are small and the technology is always changing, which makes our solution core to their success,” says Ken Konkel, Team Lead of Core Development, iQmetrix.
Managing day to day tasks of a geographically dispersed team and project progress was a challenge, especially after the company underwent a growth spurt in 2009 by 62%. Since 2007 the company averaged an annual growth rate of 90% driven by a new retail management solution, RQ4, which allows wireless retailers to create the ultimate customer experience while making better decisions, faster. To get RQ4to market, iQmetrix developers worked under tight deadlines - leaving some employees feeling frustrated, since there was limited insight into what work was being done by whom. This resulted in an overwhelming and hard-to-manage project.
“We didn’t want to end up with silos - with a team of specialized experts, each with a bit of the knowledge we needed, but no one able to see the big picture. If these individuals were sick or out of the office it really put the brakes on our progress,” says Konkel.
Cross-company reports on project status, product lifecycle, and team and individual performance were constantly being requested from all levels of the organization, yet were very difficult to create due to a lackluster reporting process.
“With teams in our Winnipeg, Regina, Vancouver and Charlotte offices all working on one project we really had to step up our project tracking and reporting systems to get insight into what gaps existed across the company,” says Konkel.
Solution
iQmetrix knew it was time for a change and engaged Imaginet to install Microsoft® Team Foundation Server 2010 and assist in the implementation of best practices for an agile development work environment. Team Foundation Server is a toolset within Visual Studio 2010, an Integrated Development Environment, which helps manage the software development lifecycle offering source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking, intended for collaborative software development projects. This solution provided iQmetrix’s developers with the efficiencies needed to complete their projects on budget and with a high degree of quality.
“Our developers have had experience with a variety of Microsoft development tools so there was no learning curve which allowed our teams to jump right into development without any hurdles. The entire development process was smooth and we have already received positive feedback from many of our customers,” says Aaron Kowall, Application Lifecycle Management Practice Lead, Imaginet.
Team Foundation Server helped the development team create robust and secure code. The Team Foundation Server unit testing framework and integrated build system features helped Imaginet get quick insight into issues and correct them faster.
“The importance of quality code is paramount for iQmetrix because we operate in such a competitive environment. Reporting services in Team Foundation Server enable us to look at rates of defects and fixes in real time to give us insight into whether our products are improving over time,” says Ken Konkel, Team Lead of Core Development, iQmetrix.
Benefits
Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server helped iQmetrix enhance its project management capabilities while improving productivity and streamlining the development processes.
Enhanced project management
iQmetrix chose Visual Studio 2010 because it enables technical and non-technical users to create and use models that help them collaborate and jointly define business and system criteria. This helped remove the traditional workflow barriers that risk separating developers and other team members, and which can lead to project delays. Easy collaboration also meant roles and responsibilities are clear throughout the project, resulting in a more efficient development process.
“Now our developers have the time to focus on bringing a quality technology to market. Before teams were working with multiple tools, on multiple platforms, on multiple servers which forced them to constantly switch and ate up a lot of valuable time,” says Konkel.
Project management capabilities and efficiency were also enhanced by streamlining reporting, which allowed iQmetrix to quickly identify and remedy gaps in performance or development process flaws.
Improved productivity
Visual Studio Team System helps iQmetrix generate regular, Web-based status reports, which allows the team to find additional resource efficiencies as the project progresses.
“We work with geographically dispersed teams and if we weren’t using Team Foundation Server we wouldn’t be able to work together as effectively as we do,” says Konkel.
By improving the development experience, Visual Studio 2010 helped 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. With Visual Studio 2010 iQmetrix delivers modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
“Our teams are twice as productive now because everything operates in one framework. As a team lead responsible for multiple areas, I didn’t know what was going on with product planning but with Visual Studio 2010 we have the tools to facilitate these critical insights,” says Konkel.
More effective development
Team Foundation Server helps developers coordinate efforts and manage projects. By centralizing project oversight, developers minimize the risk of losing information during team-member hand-offs. The developer team also took advantage of the advanced quality assurance functionality within Visual Studio 2010 to help eliminate non-reproducible bugs and ensure that all code changes were properly tested before going into production.
“iQmetrix has had a really smooth transition. We were familiar with the Visual Studio environment which allowed us to hit the ground running after implementation. Our developers started working in Team Foundation Server without skipping a beat, which really boosted the development process and allowed us to deliver a quality product on a tight timeline,” says Konkel.
The implementation of Team Foundation Server also gave Imaginet a unified platform to create a dashboard solution that lets development teams focus on their core software instead of managing multiple applications.