Case Study

Expediting report generation

Persistent Systems has deployed Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 (VSTS) to expedite the process of generating reports automatically and to enhance the existing development environment. By Priyanka Akhouri

Established in 1990 and headquartered in Pune, India, Persistent Systems is one of the outsourced software product development specialists, offering customers the benefits of offshore delivery across all stages of the product life cycle. From R&D to testing, support and professional services, Persistent delivers it all.

At Persistent Systems all the processes within the group used to be tracked individually. For its day to day activities the tools used by the company were not integrated with the aspects of development into a single one that could improve process efficiency and optimize development environment process. The managers found it difficult to generate reports automatically that showed the status of the project and these reports had to be generated manually.

The company has a dedicated team of Microsoft Technology Practice (MTP) consisting of over 250 architects, technical experts and engineers with specialized skills in core technical areas. “It was getting difficult for the team manager to remember what needs to be done and take tasks to completion. Tasks would fall off the plate and would become very difficult to track. Getting the overall data and consolidating it had become a tedious job for the managers, in turn it became a time consuming task for us,” stated Siddhesh Bhobe, Associate Vice President-Microsoft Technology Practice and IVV, Persistent Systems. To solve the existing problems, the company required a system that could send automated email reminders, created tasks, consolidated all data together and presented this in a consolidated dashboard for quick reference.

Project specific documents over the Web interface could be shared only when an intranet site was specifically set up to do the same. “The source control system was file system based, and hence could risk corruption due to hardware failures. Monitoring and tracing the requirements on disparate systems was becoming difficult,” said Bhobe. Hence, the company started taking steps to improve its application life cycle management strategy, thereby to enhance the existing development environment.

Solutions deployed

Persistent decided to implement the new platform and development system from Microsoft to further automate its development life cycle. After evaluating various technologies such as Rational ClearCase, Rational ClearQuest, ANTS Profiler, Persistent’s MTP team chose to implement Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 (VSTS) as it supported Microsoft .NET. It provides a programming model and infrastructure that lets developers create scalable and secure connected applications.

VSTS has two components—Visual Studio 2005 client and Team Foundation Server (TFS). The solution helps in increasing productivity, better application life cycle management, and better communication and collaboration.

TFS is responsible for housing all the data associated with development projects, including the source code, builds, and other artifacts such as work items. Generally, new team projects are created on a TFS by using the Visual Studio 2005 client. “TFS provides a central repository for data, and gives developers visibility of all phases of the development life cycle, from defining initial requirements through final user-acceptance testing,” said Bhobe. Moreover, the tool can be updated as per the new requirements or as the demands of the business changes in terms of various workflows and operational processes.

Implementation process and challenges addressed

The implementation was done by a team from Persistent itself. The design phase began in early October, 2006 and was completed in a month’s time while the implementation and testing was completed by mid May 2007. “This development helped in quicker deployment cycles of the tool ensuring that people get to start using it sooner and also feedback could be incorporated in a timely fashion,” added Bhobe.

However, some of the challenges addressed during implementation phase were the requirements of managers to have an interface to interact with TFS, and to have the company’s processes automated so that they can be used company wide. “Continuously changing requirements and updates to the business processes and workflows are a big challenge to any such system. The system needs to be nimble and very easy to customize and adapt to changing needs. Sharepoint made it very easy to keep it simple and very customizable with minimum disruption to the team,” stated Bhobe. The entire project can be broadly divided into two main features—resource management and revenue management. In resource management, for example, when a new resource joins the team, the team lead needs to perform some tasks like updating the MIS systems, informing the resource coordinator, adding the member to the source code repository, conducting project orientation, etc.

Benefits derived

The solution integrated well with other Microsoft applications, optimized its system architecture and advanced the quality and speed of its development process. VSTS offers all the features that are required to automate the processes during different phases of the software development cycle. It provides a programming model and infrastructure that lets developers create scalable and secure connected applications.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 provides Persistent with a programming model and infrastructure that lets developers create scalable and secure connected applications. This helps in increasing productivity, better manage and understand the application life cycle, and increase software quality.

“The tool built in this project has greatly helped team leads and managers to track day to day tasks related to adding and releasing resources on the project. It also helps in tracking finances at project/customer unit/business level. With this, invoices and accruals are tracked on a monthly basis and it gives a complete dashboard of how the unit or project is performing against what the projections were,” pointed out Bhobe. This complete picture without having to consolidate data from various groups and in a matter of seconds, saves a lot of time and effort and ensures that the data is never stale. Regular reminders of pending tasks ensure that tasks are tracked to closure and never fall off the plate.

The company’s MTP has a dedicated database, hosted on SQL Server 2005, which stores business logic and process definitions to support application flexibility. “We followed the SCRUM model to work on the development and built a desktop application, ProTRACK, which is an interface for managers to interact with VSTS.” In this model, based on the inputs from various team leads and project managers, requirements were detailed out on a week to week basis and every week new features went live. With ProTRACK, the new solution enables customization of check-in policies and creation of a team project. Moreover, the solution helps the developers to create custom Web services that enable them to catch TFS events and notify users of such events through email.

Through the tool, now, all that the team lead needs to do is add the resource to the project using the given InfoPath form and all the tasks that need to be done are generated as tasks and can very easily be tracked. Moreover, according to the company, for all the projects, dates for raising the invoices can be added to the tool and this sends reminders a week in advance, helping the manager to track the invoice till it is paid.

priyanka.akhouri@expressindia.com