Client Background
The client is a leading provider of medical devices that minimize the impact of health conditions and help give a meaningful life. The products offered include devices like blood pressure monitors, body fat monitors, digital thermometers, respiratory devices, and wrist pedometers, empowering users with the right tools and technologies they need to take charge of their health.
Project Overview
The client wanted to empower their customers by offering them a completely connected healthcare ecosystem that could track their trends, monitor progress, share data with the healthcare experts and a lot more. They wanted us to develop products, support enhancement and maintenance in a fast-paced agile mode and accelerate the delivery value every four weeks.
Business Requirements
Product Development, Maintenance and Support in Agile Mode
The client wanted us to do end-to-end product development, maintenance, and support in an Agile mode as there were multiple projects being developed at the same time. Also, the client wanted support for their entire AWS infrastructure along with testing services.
Accelerated Delivery with No SurprisesThe client wanted us to deliver business value every four weeks with a higher quality of delivery with no surprises at all.Fully Engaged Team Throughout the Development Process
The client wanted our teams to be engaged throughout the development process and complete synchronization between different teams including onsite teams, offsite teams including the client’s internal team. Our teams include the mobile application team, frontend development team, backend development teams, and product owners.
Challenges
- Mobile and web application deployment should happen every month.
- Coordinate and work with hardware and firmware releases.
- Implement a communication model overcoming the challenges of different time zones and culture.
- Feature driven fast-paced delivery.
- Documentation and approval process as per the regulatory requirements.
Solution
We set up an Agile team consisting of the following experts:
01. Agile Development Approach
Based on the business requirements and the Agility needs of the client, we recommended two Agile approaches. Here are the two agile approaches we followed:
A. Agile Scrum Approach
We defined a robust development process within Scrum which was documented and agreed with the client. The Scrum team ensured that all the defined steps in the process (Analysis, Design, Development, Reviews, Validation and Deployment) are met.
Continuous planning (progressive elaboration) was a vital feature of our delivery model. The planning followed a Just-in-time approach (details are available that are necessary at that time).
We decided to have two Agile Teams to work in parallel. The Agile team structure included a cross functional team comprising UI/UX, BA, Mobile Developers, Backend Developers, Testers, and DevOps. UI/UX, DevOps and Testers were shared between the two Agile teams.
Each sprint duration was timeboxed to 8-week and were executed in parallel with an overlap of 4 weeks. This helped us achieve the goal of releasing features every 4 weeks by either one of the agile teams. 8-week sprints helped to cover application deployments within the sprint duration.
B. Agile Kanban Approach
Kanban was followed for Production hotfixes, patches, and releases. Issues and feedback from production users are added to the Backlog (To-Do) list and prioritized by the product owner. There is no specific time-box followed and issues are immediately released based on priority and criticality.
Team
The following teams were involved in the Agile delivery:
02. Augmenting Agile Process with the Right Tools
As our development team is distributed across multiple locations, to overcome any communication gap, we used multiple online tools which were integrated and help to track everything eliminating the need for any manual tracking.
03. Comprehensive Approval and Documentation Process
We integrated multiple tools such as JIRA, confluence, GitHub, Zephyr etc. that ultimately helped us create a paperless system that could create traceability matrices and get approvals from multiple stakeholders.
Results
Our team was able to deliver the following outcomes for the client:
High Satisfaction Rate
Our client was very satisfied with the quality of our delivery. Not only were they impressed with the quality of our software engineering, but they were also happy with the speed of our delivery, which led to a high satisfaction rate.
Full Transparency
Our Agile process and the software tools being used ensured that there was full transparency between the clients and our team. This also ensured 100% accountability with our team members.
Highly Motivated Team
Implementation of Agile Project Management ensured that the team was communicating properly, and they were there to support each other. They were always there to make it out for any limitations of the other team members. This led to better co-operation and team spirit.
