About Client
Client is a desktop virtualization company providing end-to-end desktop management solutions including client virtualization, central management, and layering solutions. It helps IT and security administrators to centrally manage virtual desktops at endpoints and let users access multiple computing platforms and operating systems across devices
Work Delivered
Over a span of 7 years of association with the client, Musikaar worked with all teams within Engineering depending on client’s business needs:
- Product Development/Maintenance
- Software QA
- Technical Support
Product Development Business Needs
Client sought reduction in time-to-market for its core products to stay competitive. Moreover, with growing number of deployments new issues specific to various environments were also uncovered. Client didn't want to divert their main resources from working on features related to core business requirements. But, because of the large volume of work, they needed an experienced partner who can help them to improve the product by reducing patch development overhead and helping existing Development Team with the new feature development.
Solution
With a proficient Development team in place, we were able to engage in product development and maintenance as well as product customization. Throughout the project, we demonstrated a proactive approach to problem-solving backed by expert software development skills. Distributed software engineering suffers from poor communication and alignment of goals. In order to overcome this, we actively communicated with the client’s architectural team through informal communication channels (chat/calls) as well as formal progress and status reporting (email) to ensure that we understood the requirements correctly and the work done is at par with client’s expectations.
Benefits to the Client
Product Development assignments & maintenance tasks were undertaken successfully. Apart from considerable of saving, of money, client was able to reduce time-to-market for the product. Our flexible & dedicated approach in working with client’s development paradigms and overcoming staffing challenges, helped client to enhance overall product development.
Software QA Business Needs
- Manage & execute regression cycles. Get quick turnaround by identifying regressions in nightly builds
- Balancing between time/resources spent on testing new features and regression testing efforts
Solutions
Musikaar provided a dedicated QA Team per client requirement which grew from 3 to 12 over the last 7 years, thus forming an experienced, well-balanced team with variety of skills sets necessary for testing the Desktop Virtualization management product. QA Engineers were trained on all modules of the product and hence based on the focus of release cycle; we easily switched resources between new feature testing and regression cycle tasks.
As the product itself was a virtualization solution all the testing was supposed to be performed on physical machines. We created a test lab covering all the configurations and based on the release priority, added or reduced test machines to match the requirement. Through both staffing and on-demand lab models, we could scale to their project demands and schedules.
Onsite developers finished their work and generate a nightly build which was tested overnight (i.e. our day) and detailed report was sent before they come to work next day. This helped us to make efficient use of the 24 hours, reduce turnaround time, get faster feedback and increase overall productivity.
Our team interacted with onsite team members through emails and active participation in the calls with client’s development team, project management team and onsite QA Team members to understand the product requirements and coordinate testing activities and clarify queries if needed.
Benefits to the Client
- Enhanced Productivity: With efficient execution of the tasks and proper planning, we improved the team’s productivity which helped in achieving release deadlines.
- Shorter QA Cycles: Client could leverage the time difference between USA & India to perform round the clock testing & validation of their products, shortening the software testing cycle time.
- Wider test coverage: More configurations covered in lesser timeframe
- Test Case Management including creating and updating Test Cases
- Tailored Reporting (Daily as well as End of Iteration Reports)
- Scalable test lab with different configurations and adequate devices/tools
Technical Support Business Needs
- Provide support to customers based in different time zone
- Growing number of deployments required additional support
Solutions
We staffed the technical support team with experienced team members who had worked on similar projects, and had broad knowledge of the platform(s) our customer's IT solutions were based on. We also had QA Team members locally which was an added advantage and was helpful in terms of product understanding.
Our timezone was appropriate to cater customers in APAC region, as well as high priority issues of customers from US and European counties that would land up during night hours for US team.
We already had team members who had deep understanding of end-to-end workflow of the product. New Staff was provided detailed training about product and services offered by our customer so that they could respond to calls/emails confidently and solve problems in a speedy manner.
Benefits to the Client
- Technical queries handled with precision in timely fashion.
- Created easy to follow Knowledge Base articles that can be directly handed over to customers to help them resolve issues on their own. This helped in reducing support calls
- Rise in overall customer satisfaction level due to faster response resolving their queries/issues
- Our team also supported pre-sales Engineers
