A leading retailer of furniture, consumer electronics, and home appliances needed to maintain both its brick-and-mortar and online customer operations. The organization brought in Celsior to modernize and improve its CustomerCore application while at the same time supporting the legacy application environment.

Challenges

The client wanted to add new features to assist customers. At the same time, a variety of software bugs were impacting the application. As the application was key to organization operations, the risk and opportunity of making major changes to it were high.

Our solution

At the time of negotiating the project, the client had no offshore experience. Celsior’s offshore team proved itself by demonstrating its proficiency, talent pool, and years of experience in delivering quality software. Based on our skills, ingenuity, and know-how, the client decided to start its offshore development center at the Celsior facility in India. We became a working partner to the client in onshore-offshore coordination.

Our team handled a significant amount of development work from the client as an offshore partner. Proper onshore-offshore coordination, productive communication, structured documentation, and timely delivery were keys to success for the CustomerCore application.

From a software maintenance perspective, collaboration was key. Creative and collaborative bug fixing, and collective generation of new and useful capabilities were critical to improving software quality and integrating new features.

We focused on the four common sub-processes of problem identification, analysis, solution generation, and implementation. We discussed the key challenges during each sub-process and recommended collaborative and creative processes to deal with them.

To ensure software quality, we took several key steps. We started with training on enterprise business workflows and the project technology. An Agile methodology development process was put in place. Utilities were deployed to ensure clear and concise logging of software bugs and feature requests. We found issues with software testing—particularly dealing with difficulties in confirming the appropriate test environment due to the variety of deployed software versions. The client agreed to deploy our highly experienced QA and Testing team to automate and improve testing quality.

An onsite coordinator was appointed as a single contact to represent the team in talking about defects and feature requests with the stakeholders. This contributed to the initiative’s success, and weekly status reviews were scheduled with the stakeholders.

Business outcomes

The result of our contributions has been a thoroughly modernized CustomerCore application with enhanced features. At the same time, the number of bugs and defects has been heavily reduced. Through the core competency of our team and the use of well-integrated, offshore resources, this big step forward in quality and features has been accomplished at a significantly lower cost.