MiLife Coaching Increased Its Nearshore Development Team's Productivity With Ciklum By 20%

KIEV, Ukraine – June 22, 2009 – The new on-demand testing and QA service offered by Ciklum, the Danish IT outsourcing company specializing in nearshore software development in Ukraine, increases its clients' development teams' productivity in the region of 20-30%.

Many companies, who have set up an offshore development team, have a need for increased effort in the areas of quality assurance (QA) and testing. The increased effort may involve either requirements for temporary from time-to-time product testing or designing and implementing more advanced testing and QA processes as a permanent element of the project lifecycle management model.

Whatever the effort may specifically concern, the objective of testing and QA is clear: Increasing sales and user satisfaction by realising solid and well-tested software products to the market, and reducing the direct and indirect costs related to the development and post-release adjustments (de-bugging, error corrections, usability changes, performance issues, etc.) of the products.

One of the first users of this service were MiLife Coaching Limited, a UK company that has been building its own software development team in Ukraine with Ciklum since March 2008 to complement its UK based staff. "The quality of the work being done in Ukraine was always good and we were always very happy with the cooperation we were getting from Ciklum. Towards the end of 2008 we felt that the quality of our delivery could be improved further. In consultation with our team, we decided that we needed a dedicated QA manager on the team," says Ogi Bataveljic, the CTO of MiLife. Using eight years of best practice CSC was able to quickly identify the problem and find the right solution for the company.

The CTO continues: "We quickly saw the benefit of getting her [the QA manager] on the team and working in tandem with the developers and the team leader – some of the past quality issues were resolved and the first major end-of-cycle release after her appointment was one of the smoothest, error-free ones we could remember. Everyone contributed to this success but it was quite clear to all of us the tremendous, crucial role that our new QA manager had played.

Having a full-time QA person on the team also means that we now have improved our standard of documentation which in turn means that our developers can focus a lot more on what they are best at – developing. Further, we got more transparency in the entire development process and freed up some of our PM's time, so he now can focus more on his own tasks and project managing.

The bottom line is that not long after we extended our team with a QA manager we saw two main benefits: the quality of the delivered software went up, as did productivity (the initial assessment suggests an improvement in the region of 20-30%)."