Enterprise Product Development

• The art of developing and delivering an enterprise grade integrated platform from scratch as an augmented team

Abstract

At NodeXperts, we believe in providing the best quality, business innovation with customer-centric solutions and on-time product delivery. 

But, how do we make sure being an offshore team, really sure, that mission-critical software project is going to turn out the way our clients need and expect it to? 

There are various aspects and challenges to look after, when 250+ members of various profiles work collaboratively as an augmented offshore team with a focus in delivering an integrated Platform.

Some of the key aspects are that we to be addressed were – 

• Communication Gap
• Project Requirement
• Architectural Gap
• Code Consistency
• Integration of various parallel moving components
  

What We’ll Cover in this White Paper

This white paper contains strategies that we followed to deliver one of the biggest enterprise products as a single team and how we bridged the gaps in the successful project delivery.

1. Our Journey
   1. Projects Kick-off
   2. Initial Challenges
   3. Team Expansion
   4. Global Team Integration
   5. Next Challenges
2. Our Team
   1. Characteristics
   2. Opportunities
   3. Team Culture
3. Our Execution Plans
   1. Requirement Engineering
      • Understood their business
      • Scope the problems
      • Provided solutions
   2. Project Strategy
      • Team Hierarchy
      • Finalized the process flow
      • Finalized the tools
      • Schedule
      • Hiring & Training Process
      • Streamlined the Documentation, Development Guidelines, Quality, and Delivery Process
   3. Software Development

Built the utility components and solutions to fasten the features development process along with the features development

4. Software Quality
   We streamlined the guidelines for QA process as well which includes:
   • Coding Standards
   • E2e testing
   • Sanity Testing
   • NFT testing
   • Integrated with Pipeline
     
5. Automation in Infrastructure
   Automation in DevOps, DevSecOps, SecApp to speed up development and release process, and any security threats.
6. Security
   Embedded security in SDLC. 
7. Product Release
   Product release with 3DLs 
8. Site Reliability Models
   Integrated tools with the system to have a reliable system. 

1. Our Journey

After proving our capabilities to client and completing the formalities, the project requirements were huge and we needed to onboard members, compromising of Architects, Consultants, Designers, Developers, Scrum Masters, Project Managers. We were gearing up for taking up this challenge as a team and started streamlining all our processes including development, hiring, training plan etc and needed to work as a team to meet all the expectations. All of this was to be done in 2-3 months until the onboarding process was completed. 

1.1 Project Kick off

As consultants, we suggested client to begin with 25 members for initial 3 months, reason was pretty clear, initially we needed to:

• Streamline the project in the terms of architectural decision
• Finalize the requirements and product backlogs 
• Build common utilities 

After 2 months of onboarding process they started with 25 members for an initial period of 3 months.

1.2. Challenges

Managing a team of 250+ members (offshore team) was not going to be easy, therefore we utilized the 2 months of onboarding and initial 3 months of the project to fullest to:

• Streamline our Development Process
• Execute our Hiring Plans
• Create Effective Training Process for rapid onboarding

1.3 Team Expansion

• After 3 months, we onboarded the rest of the members consisting of newly hired candidates and existing employees, and we were successful in scaling our team strength to 100+ members in the course of 5-6 months.

1.5 More Challenges

• Delivering timely sprints, with no compromise in code quality was another major challenge of this project – this has now become a habit of all NodeXperts employees.

2. What NodeXperts brought to the table

We at NodeXperts don’t believe in micro-management, and gave full opportunity to the internal leadership of teams to drive their team as they desired to, given they follow all the development and code quality guidelines with maintaining the quality and timeline of the project.

2.1 Team Characteristics

Core working values in the project:

• Respect – Everyone is a valued member of the team regardless of where they work from (permanent, contractor or suppliers)
• Transparency / Honesty 
• Team Spirit
• Willingness to help & support each other 
• Self Driven Attitude
• Courtesy
• Open Communication (not only at stand up)
• Sharing of Knowledge
• Seek excellence
• Strict adherence to  quality 
• Supportive 
• Consistency and standard approach 
• Dedicated and hard working, in order to deliver the project due to tight deadline, our team worked day/night and over the weekends for few months

2.2. Opportunities

We at NodeXperts provide ample learning and growth opportunities to the individuals by the means of:

• Seminar, Conference, Meetup (National / International)
• Learning opportunities on other stacks of the project
• Trainings (Technical / Interpersonal skills)
• International Visits
• Team Building Activities

2.3 Team Culture
In order to have better say and communication with the onshore team, we created a process of sending a few members every month to the onsite office. This significantly helped our communication and ownership in each ART and team. 

Our Approach

To bridge the gap, soon after the onboarding process got completed, we sent a team of requirement engineering and solutions architects to client locations to understand their ideas, vision and business, before starting to devise a solution.

3.1.3 Solution Provided

After defining a high-level scope, we worked along with on-shore team and  finalized:

• Documenting the system architecture
• Agreement and documentation of infrastructure architecture
• DevOps, and Security backlogs
• Project Framework i.e. SAFe
• Team structure and hierarchy
• Coding Standards, and Development Guidelines
• Identified and Prioritized the Cross Cutting utilities
• Refining the existing product backlog
• Prioritized the features

3.2. Project Strategy

With a team of 250+ members, we understood that we needed to have a proper vision and clarity in our thoughts, therefore the first part of the process was to finalize the hierarchy, team distributions, process & tools.

3.2.1 Team Hierarchy (Cross Functional Teams)

We divided our team into independent units which we named as “POD” – Point of Delivery, responsible from delivering a module or a unit of a product

Each POD has members of specific skill set, the same are enlisted below: 

• Scrum Master (Offshore)
• Technical Product Owner (Onshore / Offshore)
• Dev Team (Offshore)
  • 1 Tech Lead
  • 2 Full Stack Developers
  • 1 Front End Developer
  • 1 Quality Analyst
  • 1 Business Analyst (optional)
    

3.2.6 Streamlined the Documentation, Development Guidelines, Quality, and Delivery Process

Being an enterprise project, maintaining the quality of the project was our primary objective along with timely delivery.

A good software project must have the following characteristics:

• Maintainability
• Correctness
• Reusability
• Reliability
• Portability
• Efficiency

Therefore all of our process & checklists were designed and adopted against the above-mentioned characteristics and were well communicated to all our development teams, specifically to our leadership teams.

We had to be smart and precise enough to work with 250 members in an effective way.

Along with this we had defined no. of checklists for pods to ensure the coding and build quality.  Some of the points in these checklist were related to the following:

• General
  • Be transparent with the client
    Raise your concern as soon as possible, in terms of dependencies and blockers.
  • Respect the deadline:

Complete the development related 2 days before the sprint, so have ample time for QA, reviews, acceptance testing, and bug fixes.

• Parallel Development
  Planned our stories in such a way such tha QA, Developers, and DevOps can start working from the very first day of every sprint.
• Documentation
  All the tasks we do should be properly documented as per the defined process.
  
• Developers

All pointers should be ticked from coding guidelines checklists as part of PR e.g.:

• 85%+ Code coverage & Unit testing
• Lint
• Coding principle & Design Patterns
• Documentation 
• PR Reviewers

Mandatory review process:

• Minimum 2 approvals mandatory
• Last Build should be passed

• Lead/Project Manager
  • Approval of lead/project manager for module’s sign-off in terms of:
    • Code Quality
    • Functional Testing
    • Acceptance Testing
• Dedicated Team for Code Quality
  • A dedicated team has also been appointed to look after code quality across entire project, and prepare a report on possible

Conclusion

For our client, we setup a complete augmented team which works as an extension of their product teams directly with their clients. This level of seamless collaboration has been made possible only due to the technical prowess and accountability that NodeXperts has demonstrated. 

NodeXperts makes technology more intelligent by embedding it with processes, data insights, and analytics to its solutions and services. With more than a decade of domain expertise, NodeXperts is one of the leading technology services providers for various industry segments including the government and public sector. Today NodeXperts is a fast-growing young leader in business process management and technology services, which leverages the power of intelligent processes, in-depth analytics and innovative technology to help its clients drive efficiency across their enterprise. 

Client Team – “The project has a complex and challenging setup and navigating that is always a challenge. For a project of this magnitude to succeed it is important that collaboration and teamwork are at the heart of any execution plan. One key success driver however, is a clear understanding of the role each individual needs play, which can be extremely challenging especially with globally dispersed teams.

Nodexperts is a great partner to work with, they understand the problems inherent in a large scale delivery and always take proactive measures to mitigate risks whilst going beyond the call of duty to support favourable business outcomes.”