Case Study
Affordable
Flexible
Practical
Proven
THE CUSTOMER
HandySoft Global Corporation is a leading provider of Business Process
Management (BPM) software, serving hundreds of customers worldwide.
The foundation for HandySoft's enterprise and departmental business process management solutions is BizFlow®, the award-winning platform for
business process management, automated workflow, and collaboration.
HandySoft Global is headquartered in Vienna, VA, with offices in Japan, London, and Korea, with strategic partner
representation throughout the world.
THE CHALLENGES
The BPM marketplace is a fast moving and highly
competitive environment. Remaining agile in managing hundreds of competing requirements from
customers, partners and marketing is a daunting
task. Like many software companies, HandySoft
needed to shorter their product lifecycle in order to
remain competitive. The company wanted to be
able to react more quickly to their customers needs,
sales requirements and competitive pressures.
HandySoft felt constrained by the waterfall development methodology they were using. Believing that
a more agile-like approach would achieve the desired objectives, the development team began their
next release cycle with an incremental development
approach.
But changing methodologies posed problems across
the other teams who were unclear as to how the
rest of the lifecycle process fit with this new development method. What deliverables were expected
at what time? To what depth would requirements
and specifications be written and when? When was
testing to be done and what documentation would
exist to help the testing team develop their test
cases? When would documentation be updated for
new features?
The team knew that they needed to re-define their
overall process. They also viewed this as the ideal
time to reassess using a more comprehensive SDLC
(Software Development Lifecycle Management) tool
to replace the disparate MS Sharepoint and MS Office tools they had been using.
BEFORE QAvantage and RTIME™
•
Difficulty with requirement prioritization and
roadmap planning
•
Cross-team challenges transitioning from a
waterfall to more agile-like methodology
•
No single source of information leading to
communication and productivity issues
THE SOLUTION
HandySoft first selected RTIME™ by QAvantage to address
their product lifecycle management tool needs. RTIME™ provided an affordable, easy to use and rapid to implement
single-source solution. RTIME had the front end requirements and release planning tools that product management
and marketing needed. It also had the back-end task, test
case and issue management tools the development and QA
teams needed.
In a one day workshop, a QAVantage product management
consultant worked with the HandySoft team to define a new
methodology. The first step was understanding the new
development approach being adopted and the potential disconnects with the other organizations. Next, project phases,
key deliverables and clear hand-offs were defined. Once
defined, the phases and deliverables were added to the
RTIME library to be used as a best-practice template.
RTIME TM — The most effective tool for managing and delivering quality software.
THE METHODOLOGY
At the core of the new methodology is it’s use of preplanning and post development phases based on HandySoft’s former waterfall method while injecting 30 day
development time boxes and shorter QA cycles in place
of one long development phase followed by one long QA
cycle.
In the initial release planning phase, prioritization and
trade-off analysis tools in RTIME help the team assess
their high-level requirements. They prioritize the requirements and determine candidates for the release
based on rough order of magnitude estimates and other
key attributes.
NEW PROJECT PHASES
Release Planning Phase
Requirement Prioritization
Trade-Off Analysis
Initial Time boxing
Time Box Build 1
Prototyping/Walk-thrus
Requirement Update with Spec Details
QA Test Case Development
QA Cycle 1
Feature Testing/Platform 1
Once the requirement candidates are finalized, 30 day
development time boxes begin. Clarification of the requirements with the development team is the first step
within the time box. Then development and the rest of
the team walk-thru prototypes or mock-ups for validation.
Once validated, the new consolidated requirement and
specification document is updated.
Requirements might also split into multiple requirements
with some portion being deferred or rejected. As each
requirement moves through various stages within the
time box, their status and any changes are updated and
audited in RTIME.
QA iterations that occur after each time box allow for
new features to be tested, driving early defect identification and correction. And with RTIME, requirement to
test case coverage is enforced ensuring complete trace-
THE RESULTS
With a new methodology and RTIME to help them maintain a repeatable and effective process, HandySoft can
respond more rapidly to customer and market demands.
Time Box Build 2
Requirement reprioritization as needed
Prototyping/Walk-thrus
Requirement Update with Spec Details
QA Test Case Development
QA Cycle 2
Feature Testing/Platform 2
Time Box n based on release target
QA Full Cycle/Regression
Release
DEPLOYING RTIME
Delivered on a plug-n-play appliance server, the installation of RTIME took only a few minutes. A one day
workshop completed the RTIME configuration and within
the first 2 weeks the product management team was
able to load all requirements from various sources. 4
web-based classes later the solution was rolled out to
all teams.
After QAVantage and RTIME™
•
More methodical feature prioritization,
roadmap and release planning
•
A more agile development method improving
their time to market and competitive advantage
•
A single repository of information improving
RTIME was up and running day 1.
We quickly consolidated multiple sources of requirements and the prioritization and trade-off analysis
tools were instrumental to our roadmap and release
planning.
Rob Cain, Director of Product management
collaboration and productivity
About QAVantage
QAVantage is a software and consultative services company headquartered
in Red Bank, NJ, USA and makers of RTIMETM.
www.qavantage.com
1-800-573-1983