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CASE STUDY

Large IT shop speeds up development and boosts productivity by 8-12%

Global SI

A global System Integrator (SI) is providing Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) services to thousands of clients. In this case, its client is a European public transportation company.

CAST Imaging enabled faster delivery of change requests and accelerated newcomer onboarding. The SI measured the impact on two teams where only half of each team was using CAST Imaging daily.

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Image 1

Fig 1. Efficiency for change requests, with and without CAST Imaging

Image 2

Fig 2. Newcomers and internal moves, with and without CAST Imaging

Global SI

CAST automatically showed me links and components used by the application that were unknown to us before and we were able to overhaul this part of the application much faster

Senior Technical Expert
3 years on the project

8-12%
higher efficiency

of handling software change requests

30-50%
less time

for fully onboarding newcomers

Challenge

The Global SI had been serving for 15 years its client, a major public transportation company in Europe.

As the business needs grew, the client and the SI were looking at scaling by building a new near-shore delivery center, as well as finding a way to boost the speed of delivery and onboarding of newcomers.

There were several hard-to-address challenges:

  • How to reduce ramp-up and training time for newcomers.
  • How to minizine the need for digging in code daily and constantly engaging the SMEs.
  • How to optimize delivery of changes and reduce their impact on the rest of the software system.
  • How to accelerate transition of new projects (expansion), especially the transfer of knowledge.

Solution

The Global SI deployed CAST Imaging and decided to measure the impact on 2 teams of 30 and 40 developers, respectively. The teams were working on large applications made of Java, J2EE, Angular, Cobol, APIs, JavaScript, Oracle databases.

Half of each team was using CAST Imaging daily and the other half was not using CAST Imaging at all.

Based on their well-established internal time-tracking process, the SI observed over a period of 9 months the average time for implementing typical change requests.

The Global SI compared the efficiency prior to the teams using CAST Imaging and the difference of productivity for developers who use CAST Imaging vs. those who do not.

Before the introducing of CAST Imaging, the productivity of all developers was largely the same.

Results

After introducing CAST Imaging, the SI measured a steady productivity gain of 8-12% for those using CAST Imaging (fig 1).

Teams using CAST Imaging could build change plans faster, they could define the non-regression testing more precisely, and they could create their statement of work more easily.

The Global SI also looked at the ramp-up time for newcomers (fig 2).

Given the long experience with their client and its applications, the Global SI already knew that a newcomer or internal transfer needs 3 to 4 months to be fully productive, meaning, to be fully efficient working on changes and on maintenance tasks.

The Global SI observed that now newcomers could be almost fully efficient after 2 months vs. to 3 to 4 months prior to use CAST Imaging.