Process Optimization and Training

Reducing Software Development Time

Our Client

Our client, a global leader in entertainment data, serves more than 5,000 companies that, together, reach 100 million consumers. 

The Background

The adoption of fat Java applications and reusable components should have sped up the software development cycle. What happened was exactly the opposite: development times were slowing dramatically. A client contact had made the acquaintance of a Blue Slate principal some time before, so he contacted Blue Slate for help.

The Challenge

Dozens of standard methodologies and programming solutions have been created to optimize processes. The challenge, for Blue Slate, was to discover the root cause of the client’s specific issues, search for best-of-breed solutions, and adapt them to precisely fit the client environment.

The Blue Slate Solution

The Blue Slate team (consisting of a business process consultant and a Java expert) spent many hours interviewing programmers, project managers, and other stakeholders to get to the root of the slowing cycle. After compiling their results, team members arrived at 10 recommendations—the centerpiece of which was a hybrid Scrum methodology that featured daily project meetings and clear lines of communication. Blue Slate trainers then equipped the client’s developers to use the methodology.

 In another recommendation, team members put forward a method for documenting code where no documentation had existed previously, enabling developers to increase their reuse of existing code. And because project managers needed greater Java fluency to resolve issues in their teams, senior Blue Slate principals trained them to “speak the language.”

 The client was sufficiently pleased to call in Blue Slate on a separate matter—to find a suspected memory leak in the data center software. Using sophisticated diagnostic tools, a Blue Slate application developer discovered an entirely different cause of the problem: not memory leakage, but underpowered computers. A test on two workstations resolved the performance issue entirely, and the client used the diagnosis to acquire resources for a full memory upgrade. As a result, Blue Slate saved the client many thousands of dollars in writing a fix for a nonexistent memory leak.