Real Plus

Founded in 1990, our customer is an American real estate agency that provides an exclusive web portal in the New York City area. It’s a subscription-based solution with an average number of daily visits between 15-20k (peak value was 35k users).

The agency’s business was growing fast, so there was a need to speed up the development and push their software to a higher level. Their outsourcing vendor of the time couldn’t provide that.

In spring of 2014, the customer decided to find a new vendor with a more senior level of expertise. That’s when our collaboration started. We were supposed to take complete ownership of the code and handle HR and team management issues.

Brightgrove had to accomplish the following goals:

• Set up a consistent and stable Agile Scrum development process.
• Boost the performance of both the in-house and Dedicated teams.
• Take care of the technical debt accumulated by previous vendors. The customer had worked with many remote teams from China, Vietnam, India and Russia, which led to more than a million lines of old legacy code we had to clean up.
• Improve the overall quality of the code as the customer had no QA engineers.
• Fix the product’s security issues.
• Assign the dedicated Product Owner to reduce the workload of customer’s Product Owner.
• Upgrade the portal with new functionality and further improvements.

Boosting Customer’s Development Capacity

To avoid delays in the development process, we assembled the dedicated team in the shortest possible period of time. After analyzing the code and business rules of the portal, we determined the initial number of professionals needed to start the Agile development flow.

In 42 days, our Recruitment Department hired 4 .NET developers and 2 QA engineers to review the old code and plan sprints together with the client’s architect. The team grew to 10 specialists by the end of 2014.

Cleaning Up the Legacy Code

Our 2 senior QA specialists started with the creation of very detailed and descriptive pages based on business rules, main user stories, and possible outcomes of different behavior in Confluence.

It took 3 months to document most of the business rules and positive test scenarios that users do on an everyday basis.

So, for code cleaning, we hired 2 senior architects to re-write the core functionality of the old features and improve the overall quality of code.

Over the first 5 months of the transition period all the code had been re-written. Then we introduced Migrations, got rid of stored procedures, and substituted them with C# code plus Entity Framework Queries.

Implementing Scrum

We hired our own Product Owner and project manager to relieve the customer’s Product Owner of unnecessary workload and set up a strong management and administration process.

The dedicated project manager selected the team leaders for QA, design, and front- and back-end development; these team members were facilitated and mentored to develop their sustainable skills.

Our dedicated team of 16 senior professionals works for the client since 2014, and we’ve retained 90% of them. During the time of that partnership client’s product became number one in the New York area, and we’re not stopping there. We’re continuing to expand the team by hiring top-notch professionals. Our client has big plans for the next year: developing a new mobile application and rewriting parts of the legacy code.