Client: Vermont based SaaS technology business
Industry: Hospitality and Resorts
Technology: Microsoft .NET, Team Foundation Server
Remote Team: 8 Software Developers, 3 Testers
Location of remote team: Romania
Our Client: a SaaS solution offering ecommerce, business intelligence, and marketing for the travel, resort, and hotel industry.
Located in a region with a limited developer hiring market, our client sought to expand their product development team with distributed engineers.
In order to establish confidence in the new remote team, we structured a 3-month pilot project with a distributed team of 2 engineers, centralized and managed by a trusted partner, to develop a software component for the SaaS product. The development was managed independently by the distributed team, with guidance from the client’s senior engineer, and was completed with very positive feedback from our client’s engineering manager.
Having established the technical and communication capabilities of the distributed team, our client continued to utilize the team as an independent unit to work on the product backlog.
It’s worth noting that the software developed has many integrations with 3rd party systems, making development more complex. The architecture was a mixture of legacy and new design, and therefore a careful analysis was needed on new initiatives. Having a small team, analysis is an element of every engineer’s responsibility. Clearly, communication skills are very highly valued.
The success of the initial two phases of work, gave our client confidence to expand the team to 8 software engineers and 3 software testers. The distributed team was then integrated into four scrum units, to work along with U.S. engineers on the same product backlogs. Our client’s engineering leadership is very proficient in running Agile Scrum. This helped greatly in setting clear process and communication expectations. The distributed teams participated in all elements of the process, from sprint planning meetings, to retrospectives, and daily stand-ups.
The leadership and managers of the distributed team maintained monthly meetings with our client’s leadership, and visited in-person several times to check-in on the relationship and assure any issues were resolved swiftly.
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