Agile Offshore - No Problem, a Story of Distributed Agile Success

Summary

"We are proud to be associated with our Symbio team. The Symbio team members added product experience, sound solutions, rapid fire fixes, sound architectural skills, team leadership, and strong project management skills. Thanks for your passionate and dedicated efforts, intelligent solutions, and perseverance.”

Symbio Group has valued its partnership with one of the largest oil and gas drilling companies in the United States for the past four years. When approached with an opportunity for an application re-write of a catalog editor for one of the most complex drilling programs in the market today, Symbio was ready to deliver. The Symbio team, comprised of senior level developers and testers, worked closely with the domain specific application to deepen their understanding of the oil and gas industry and successfully provide a better code base, enhance the user interface while improving performance and ease of use.

Symbio provided the following services:

• Product development
• QA/Testing
• Globalization
• Support

By working with Symbio, this oil and gas company re-engineered a critical piece of its drilling application with an iterative approach that created a highly communicative, flexible, and scalable environment, which reduced cost significantly and exceeded all requirements.

Business Challenge

In order to remain a top provider of drilling software solutions in the market, the client wrestled with taking an older, yet stable application that had been in circulation for years and migrating it to a framework and platform that would provide greater flexibility and scalability going forward. The question became, "How do we take our existing application and make it more robust while maintaining quality performance and avoiding the common problems that occur when a complex program is moved to another platform?” To lower the project risks a migration effort can present, the client chose to use the Agile development methodology as this approach would provide detailed insight into the project status, allowing the team to make changes and address problems as soon as they arose.

Implementing a successful Agile project with team members off-shore can sound overwhelming. Symbio worked closely with the client’s United States based team and implemented a formula for success. Logistics including time zone, communication, and language barriers were not concerns because of Symbio’s best practices in technology, project management, English and cultural training, dedication, and work ethics. Symbio was well prepared for the challenge and successfully completed an Agile project in eight months.

Success of this project included:

• Delivered new releases of the application on time and according to schedule
• Iteration planning sessions and product demonstrations ran with ease and with full team cooperation with over 12K miles between teams
• The US based teams had full visibility into the working environments of the teams delivering the Agile work based in Beijing

How We Helped

The Symbio team needed to move the client’s application from a custom framework to a C#/.NET platform. Leveraging the Agile development methodology, Symbio created a hybrid of this approach to successfully implement Agile in an offshore/distributed environment. With a strong communication plan and tools to back it up, the clients’ on-shore teams held daily video conference meetings (SCRUM) and maintained the tight communication necessary to implement a successful Agile project. The combination of an Agile approach and Symbio’s software development best practices enabled the team to address the architecture, development, testing and bug tracking needed for a successful delivery.

Business Results

Since Symbio had an existing trusted relationship with the client for more than 4 years, the client turned to the Symbio development team for assistance with an extremely important and delicate project. Symbio’s commitment to staffing the right leadership roles and paying strict attention to items, such as providing the right project tools and investing in new communication/video conferencing systems provided the client with the environment they were looking for to ensure project success. Primary objectives of the project including a better code base, enhancement of the UI, elimination of old defects related to performance and ease of use were all successfully met within eight months.