Forte Group

Please describe your company and your position there.

Company: Tinder -- key player at the dating industry.

Position: Engineer Manager -- responsible for release management and QA Being Engineering Manager at Tinder, I’m a key driver behind Tinder's mobile release management, QA process, and Mobile DevOps

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

Expand Testing services for flagman Tinder mobile and web apps

What were your goals for this project?

Increase testing coverage and decrease QA cycle Penetrate each QE into the functional team for transparency and testing during dev cycle Increase test automation coverage for faster feedback.

How did you select Forte Group?

After conducting interviews and technical assessment for 3 vendors, we've selected Forte Group for the following criteria:

1. Proficiency in English
2. Mobile testing experience of the employees
3. Relevant experience in mobile test automation

Describe the project in detail.

Once the internal team has defined a new release/qa process, we've onboarded Forte Group initial team of testers for a dry run. After 2 release iterations, we've collected feedback from several teams to adjust the process.

Once the new release/qa process was settled we've onboarded the rest of the team and embedded them to each POD -- functional team.

The Test Automation team was onboarded separately with engineering leads and tasked with technical user stories with the focus on the increasing test automation coverage for the key product features.

What was the team composition?

QA Lead in California who oversee the operation of the entire Forte Group manual testing team. Web team -- 1 manual tester + 1 automation engineer who report to the Web product/eng leads iOS Automation team -- lead in California who managed 2 Forte iOS SDETs Android Autonation team -- lead in California. who managed 2 Forte Android SDETs

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

As a result Q2 of 2020 of a partnership with Forte Group, Tinder engineering team has achieved the following success:

1. Zero hotfixes in Q2
2. Majority of bugs were found prior to the release branch cut not after
3. More bugs get fixed during the development cycle for the new features 4.30% of the smoke test suite is automated → 10% of Entire Regression

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

From day one we did not treat Forte Group team as a separate entity. We've embedded each person into the internal team with proper onboarding procedures and 100% transparency with the in-house engineering team.

Thus collaboration from day one was as if they were part of the team.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

the most impressive aspect of Forte Group is how they recruited and select resources for their clients.

They don't follow a pattern of the most outsource companies -- "one-size-fits-all" Forte Group recruiting focuses on client demand and try to select resources based on key business needs.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Would be great if Forte Group has more presence in Central and South America.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I have worked with Forte Group going back more years then I care to recall and across multiple employers. Primarily during these engagements I was in the Role of a QA Manager, Test Manager, Director.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

I primarily used Forte Group for Staff Augmentation within the QA, BA, and Dev departments.

What were your goals for this project?

Most of the project were new system implementations with complex data migration events.

How did you select this vendor?

Every consulting company claims they are better then their competitors and yet they all depend on more or less the same pool of candidates to staff from so in my opinion what is actually different between various consulting companies is their culture and what they value. In meeting with this vendor and discussing what they value, how the see the industry, trends, and where/how they recruit I saw a company that: is hungry to succeed, is open to taking risks and sharing risks, is always looking for new ideas based on past learning, and that really values people and relationships.

Describe the project in detail.

As mentioned earlier I have partnered with this vendor across multiple employers and projects. Typically before reaching out I will have some high level idea of what sort of resources I am looking for, what skill sets I need, and what the project timelines look like. If there is long term work, and there usually is, I also try to manage my work so that we are constantly gradually building up the team and gradually re-distributing resources across projects. I like to build up area SME's and have an organization with some Hierarchy.

What was the team composition?

This really just depends. I had project with resources spread all over the globe and projects that were just staffed with resources in Chicago. What was a little different was working with teams in the former soviet block. Not a lot of consulting companies offer those resources and I found the overlap in timezone, their skillets, and general aptitude for the work to be wonderful.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

If I was not successful with their resources I would obviously not have a long relationship with this firm. I have not had ANY projects that failed and actually quite a few people that were brought on for staff aug ended up converting to FTE's and a few are still in their places of conversion.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

This is key! To me it's all one team. You can have different responsibilities but you either succeed or fail together. Forte is open to either aligning with your workflow, suggesting theirs, or generally best is having a hybrid solution. All resources have proven to be flexible and agile.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The passion and drive. All projects have ups and down, periods when things appear to be impossible, and tough conversations. Forte always came of as committed, they had faith in the work, provided helpful insight, and always had our back,

Are there any areas for improvement?

I really like this firm and have nothing to offer around improvement.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the UI/UX product design manager for a machinery manufacturer.

What challenge were you trying to address with Forte Group?

They started as our main supplier. At the time, I was working as a design lead and wasn’t part of the choice to bring them in. We had a lot of work and didn’t want to hire any full-time employees so they were able to place designers for our UI/UX work very rapidly.

What was the scope of their involvement?

At first, they placed two designers with the skillsets we needed. They had to be able to deliver advanced design work. We were working on displaying products, and they were working on some of the vehicle apps and internal apps I want to say. Specifically, they did asset deliverables for the imagery — all the images and pictures that come out of the design. They also helped the informational architecture and workflows at the beginning.

They had three main deliverables: the specification requirements, the pixel measurements, and the interaction documents detailing how it works. Forte simply provided us with the resources and we trained them internally.

What is the team composition?

They hire a designer for our team and then that designer works through us. I work directly with our account manager, Peter (Senior Account Executive, Forte Group), and their HR rep and their accounts receivable team. That’s my normal day-to-day with them and I enjoy working with them a lot because they’re able to do things fast.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $2,000,000–$3,000,000 so far with them, at around $500,000 per year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them since October 2015. Right now we have four designers working on our team, and we’ve had as many as eight depending on our needs.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our biggest metric was them being able to place a designer for us that didn’t need any additional training and fit with our needs. One of the things they do very well is they’re able to adapt to our changing needs. I call into the interviews when we’re placing someone, but what Forte does really well is that when I review multiple candidates they’re all meeting the base-level requirement. Now, I can be part of the process and find the right fit.

If I’m in an interview and someone isn’t really who they seem on paper, I’ll give them different screening questions to use and they’ll integrate them. This helps me expend less effort in screening the candidates. Another metric is their response time. We have to do quotations of work and I need to know right away if I need 150 hours of work how much it’ll cost. They’re able to turn those numbers around very quickly.

How did Forte Group perform from a project management standpoint?

We’ve had multiple account managers over the years and they’ve all been successful at being able to anticipate and focus on our needs. We touch base regularly, whether that’s in-person or over the phone and they’ll check in to make sure the work is being done and the designers are on-track. Traditionally, if there is a performance issue, I will reach out to them. They’re not part of our day-to-day since we haven’t really had those kinds of issues.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The speed and accuracy of the data they provide me with are amazing. I’ve worked with other suppliers in the past and their turnaround time is very slow. With Forte, I can send a note now and they could give it back to me before the end of the day. Their customer service gets me what I need.

The other thing I want to note is their HR support. I can’t give any of the designers performance reviews since they’re not my employees but I work directly with Forte’s HR group. They provide reviews and I can see the growth. I can see that my information is being given to the designers.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Our one struggle — and this might be the same for every supplier we work with — is with tools. There are so many security hoops we have to jump through. We have challenges with VPNs breaking and communication things going out, but Forte does what they can to support that. It’s very challenging on everyone’s end, but that would be it. It might be more out of their control as well.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be open to their suggestions when it comes to recruiting because they do know best since they’ve been doing it for years. I’ve had situations when I was hedging on someone because they lacked the perfect background, but they assured me they would be a good fit. They’ll find the people for you which stops you from putting in too much effort. They’re going to send you good people. I try to step off of my micromanaging.

Please describe your company and your position there.

NexLP is a bleeding edge artificial intelligence and machine learning company. The company was founded by leading data scientists and legal investigation experts to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the e-discovery, risk and compliance markets. NexLP’s technology vision is to structure unstructured data to better support AI and ML solutions in the communication analysis and predictive modeling space. I run the software engineering and data science team. I am entirely responsible for delivery of product. I manage engineering, data science, testing, product management, user experience, performance, scalability, and documentation.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

The NexLP platform helps legal and compliance teams gain actionable insights from data through AI and machine learning. NexLP helps teams make sense of structured and unstructured data to drive operational efficiency and proactive risk mitigation. Our development team was working toward the release plan for the year.

However, with the team at full capacity, the release plan began to experience gaps that forced us to deprioritize multiple features. Specifically, certain features providing third-party integrations, data exports, and data imports have been requested by several of our customers. We knew we needed outside help to build those features, and after reviewing several delivery partners, we chose to move forward with Forte Group.

What were your goals for this project?

We hired Forte Group’s managed team to accelerate our development efforts without affecting the current release plan. Our team’s goal was to build and enhance third-party integrations and NexLP’s data import and export capabilities. These features could be worked on independently without affecting the primary development team’s progress.

How did you select this vendor?

We worked with Forte Group in the past, utilizing their staff augmentation services. We knew that they would be able to provide us with great engineering talent and high-quality solutions.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

It was a set of subsequent projects rather than one big project. The Forte team conducted their own discovery session, then broke down the features in each user story that they organized in the story map. From there, we estimated and prioritized the stories and created a roadmap of releases going forward for a year.

First, the team worked to enhance integrations with our partners in the eDiscovery space: Relativity and Reveal. After that, the team worked to enhance our data export capabilities, following by data import. Most importantly, since we’re operating in the big data space, high performance was crucial for all planned features.

What was the team composition?

The Forte team was comprised of two full-stack .NET developers, one QA engineer, and a part-time product owner.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Forte’s team successfully released each of our planned features over a series of releases. They quickly onboarded onto our complex code base and figured out all the required dependencies for features in their scope. This helped us deliver on our promises to some of our biggest customers. Those customers were impressed by the quality and performance of capabilities Forte’s team delivered.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We collaborated effectively using a Scrum framework. The team planned their work in two-week iterations, which helped us shift direction due to changing priorities, if necessary. The product owner was the face of the team. He not only worked with the Forte team to help them get a better understanding of our product, users and their use cases, but he also helped them with day-to-day issues in order to deliver planned features on time for every sprint.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Forte provided an end to end software delivery package. They managed all responsibilities, from product management to engineering to testing. This left me with no need to fill gaps, as I could count on the Forte team to manage their delivery without issue. Their product managers were top notch and their developers were supplied at a very good price.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None that I can think of. Overall, it was a great partnership that allowed us to meet our delivery goals and keep our customers happy.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Chief Technology Officer at Insureon, the leading online small commercial / micro-insurance platform in North America. We’ve served more than 350,000 small businesses with more than $1 billion total premiums delivered. We operate multiple web platforms that leverage our proprietary end-to-end integrated agency management, website, and online search capabilities to grow our business.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

Since 2012, we’ve partnered with Forte Group to build and improve upon our Insureon platform. In our eight years of working together, Forte has provided us with staff augmentation and team augmentation services, both off-shore and locally.

What were your goals for this project?

Since Insureon was founded in 2011, we’ve worked hard to build upon and improve the platform to what it is today—the largest online marketplace for small-business insurance in the United States. In that time, we’ve worked on numerous improvements, including a test automation framework, cloud migration, additional features, and platform improvements that have enhanced Insureon’s stability, speed, and user experience.

How did you select this vendor?

We were looking for a delivery partner that could offer smart, technically proficient people and teams that would work well with our internal team. We also needed flexibility, as our development needs scale up and down. All of this had to come at an affordable cost. Throughout the last eight years, we’ve found Forte to be an ideal fit to those needs. On several occasions, we’ve opted to hire several high-quality placements from the Forte team to join our internal team. Forte Group has become our premier partner in staff augmentation, quality assurance, and testing services. Forte offers a unique approach and is creative in making our partnership successful.

Describe the project in detail.

Throughout our partnership with Forte Group, we’ve built and initiated dozens of improvements to the Insureon platform, bolstered by improved test practices through building and maintaining our current test automation framework. We are now integrated with every major U.S. carrier.

What was the team composition?

The size of the team has varied over the course of our engagement, but we’ve utilized off- and on-shore resources from Forte Group. Our current team consists of five .NET developers and two test automation / quality assurance engineers.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Forte has been successful in helping us build, support, and enhance our platform. This partnership has been instrumental in the success of our organization.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We have consistently hired and promoted Forte team members—they’re an extension of our own team and operate fluidly, both on- and off-shore. The length of our partnership—eight years—speaks to its success.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

What continues to impress me about Forte is their ability to find, hire, and place talented IT professionals quickly. Forte’s teams have been embedded with our internal teams for years and consistently work and mesh well with our internal teams.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our process, product, and how we serve our customers. Forte Group has been an excellent partner in that steady improvement.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a senior software engineer for a company that provides products and services for the Golf industry.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

My department is responsible for several legacy products. After several acquisitions over the years, staffing was reduced significantly. Forte provides staffing that fulfills Q/A and ongoing software development functions.

What were your goals for this project?

Increase resource bandwidth in general with additional staff members, address and increase quality issues across the product set, resolve large areas of outstanding tech debt and modernize broad areas of the products.

How did you select this vendor?

Forte Group was already providing staffing for other areas of our organization, and had earned a good reputation while doing so. Choosing them for additional staffing services appeared to be a low risk, wise choice.

Describe the project in detail.

We are a Scrum/Agile shop. Forte Group staff members participate in our normal routine, like all teams. These products are legacy with a fairly large user base. As such, there's constant flux in the product, new functionality and expansion, as well as resolution of technical debt and quality issues. Forte Group staff members work in all areas, assisting in all areas of the product.

What was the team composition?

This particular team includes 3 Forte Group staff members; 2 are developers/engineers, 1 is QA. The rest of the team is a mix of domestic and off shore resources, including other devs/engineers and PO.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The Forte Group staff members resolved lots of quality issues and the product is much more stable today as a result. They have also assisted in rolling out several major new features. Soon, they will assist in in larger re-engineering efforts on back end and front end areas of the products. They have done very well with all of the above. Also, with all of them being offshore on different time zones, they have worked well to stay organized and focused with a minimal of available domestic team management on a daily basis.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The entire team communicates very well and frequently through the day. The off shore team is spread across 5 time zones and work together very well during non-domestic regular work times. All team members communicating constantly as needed via Slack, etc, including domestic staff. Obviously, this is given time zone availability constraints.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The staff members are very sharp. I am incredibly pleased and impressed with the quality and skills they provide and possess. Forte Group provides a great administrative support structure. Working with the Forte Staff around the team is great and has worked really well. They have gone to greater lengths than any contractor I've worked with to provide equipment and resources as needed for various jobs, and really just to support the staff members in general. They have dedicated admin support staff for these purposes and it works really well.

Are there any areas for improvement?

As always, there are a few areas that could improve. Mostly from our side, such as providing better direction, planning, etc, so they can focus more efficiently on various tasks. Of course, communication is always a challenge with any group, especially for distributed teams. So, always seeking to improve habits and techniques around reducing "head gap" on the team.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

When I worked with Forte Group, I was a Solution Owner and IT Director at a Financial Solutions company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Forte Group?

The main challenge we had at that company was an enormous backlog of software improvements from tech debt to new features to entirely new softwares that we wanted to build. We just could not seem to qualify, validate, and hire fast enough to keep up with that demand.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Forte provided two things for us. One was to effectively give us a scrum team that could come in and campion our backlog, get our stuff built and train any of our in-house employees on what they had developed. From there, our team would take over or just make sure it was running smoothly before they moved on to something else.

What is the team composition?

I had two managed services teams here in Chicago that I worked with directly, each of which was between 6–8 people. As the relationship grew, we added a third managed services team that was located in Belarus.

How did you come to work with Forte Group?

Forte Group had actually helped place me in my role at my company, so I knew they were capable of fielding qualified candidates and that our team was in need of exactly that kind of service. I was able to build on that personal relationship and help expand its footprint with our company.

How much have you invested with them?

I’m not sure what the total budget at this point is, but it was over $2,000,000 in the time that I was there.

What is the status of this engagement?

They started their work for the company in January 2017 and are continuing to work with them, although I am no longer a part of the interaction.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

In the projects that we used Forte for, there was just no way that we were going to get those projects off the ground without Forte’s help. Because they gave us a managed services team rather than a couple of individuals, their ramp-up time was extremely small.

They were able to figure out what they were going after, intelligently suggest features and ideas that we hadn’t thought of and improve our product offerings overall. That was very much a credit to their team’s experience and ability to execute.

It was clear throughout our engagement with them that they cared more about building a great project at the end of the day than what their billable hours looked like, so there was never a case where we received a deliverable with gaps in its functionality or even a time when all of their work wasn’t perfectly documented for us to keep track of.

How did Forte Group perform from a project management standpoint?

One of the scrum masters that Forte sourced ended up managing multiple projects under me, and he was by far the best project manager I have ever had the chance to work with. Our team developed clear rules around how we wanted to work, how we wanted to operate, and how we wanted to communicate. He took all that feedback and made sure that we were accountable and responsible for those particular rules for the good of the overall projects.

They were great at stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of what our company needed to do to be successful and then presenting us with the pros and cons of developing one thing versus another in terms of how it would affect that larger picture of things.

What did you find most impressive about them?

In the team that I was provided originally, half of them hadn’t ever worked together before, a couple of them were software engineers who were filling QA roles instead, and yet they all came together to accomplish the goals that we set in front of them, regardless of how lofty those goals were.

They always did a good job of keeping me abreast of their higher-level conversations about how people were feeling about the progress of the project. At the same time, I could provide transparency around how I felt we were moving, and that allowed them to anticipate what was coming next in a much better way than they would ever have been able to otherwise. That level of transparency and camaraderie was absolutely invaluable to the project.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Our particular technology stack and architectural approach were often not the best fit for the goals that we were giving them to work towards. They really tried to position themselves as a partner at first in debating what the best approach to each project would be, but as time wore on, they became less eager to collaborate and tended to just ask what we needed and execute it.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The people at Forte are incredibly knowledgeable and have a huge amount of combined experience. If you’re thinking about scoping a project, it’s extremely valuable to get to the root of the problem and find a practical approach to solving it. The earlier you get them involved, the faster they will be able to hit the ground running and the more momentum they will have to get up to speed.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Utopia Solutions is a software quality and testing firm. We help our clients improve the way they develop and test software through project based solutions and managed services. I am the CTO responsible for the delivery of our services.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

We hired Forte to build a managed service testing team to provide ongoing testing services to one of our strategic clients.

What were your goals for this project?

Integrate with the client's development teams to high quality functional testing to maintain product quality

How did you select this vendor?

We selected Forte based on their reputation for providing exceptional QA and testing services

Describe the project in detail.

We built a team of 15 testing resources consisting of both onsite and offshore members. The team consisted of both test analysts and test automation engineers and was responsible for testing a series of integrated system for a client in the education space. The team has been a key part of the client's development efforts for over 9 years.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of an average of approximately 15 people over the duration of the project.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The client was able to significantly improve product quality through both quality assurance activities as well as Forte's testing services.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow between the client and the Forte team has been extremely smooth from the beginning. They integrated as part of the client team extremely efficiently.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The ability to come up to speed with the client's environment and domain/application knowledge was extremely efficient.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None that come to mind.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Director of Engineering for the Web and Mobile development teams that deliver solutions for our business to consumer line of business.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

We had a need for additional development and QA team members and Forte came to the table with solid candidates that hit the ground running. The QA team completely re-wrote our automation suite and the developers immediately added value to our in progress development efforts for our e-commerce site.

What were your goals for this project?

Deliver higher levels of quality and deliver our product teams new features.

How did you select this vendor?

I had some prior experience with Forte and was impressed with their organization and the team members that they supplied. Working with our CTO we determined they would be a good fit for what we were looking for at our company.

Describe the project in detail.

Two of the team members were added to support our feature development for our web e-commerce site, another two team members were added to support our mobile application and three team members were added to our QA team to build out our automation.

What was the team composition?

4 Developers, 2 for Web Full Stack Development, 2 for React Native Mobile Development and 3 for QA manual and automation testing

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Our automation suite was completely rebuilt and improved our coverage by 40% over our previous suite and we were able to keep pace when added new feature / functionality. Our development teams were able to add additional velocity and deliver more feature work as defined by our Product team.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are always looking for ways to improve and are very supportive of their team members and supporting our company.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None I can think of at this time.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the IT QA Manager for Redwood Logistics.

For what projects/services did your company hire Forte Group?

Our company leadership wanted to shift direction and increase productivity and to help provide that in a quick turnaround we needed to augment our staff.

What were your goals for this project?

Be able to have enough resources to successfully test (and deploy) important new features for our business.

How did you select this vendor?

We’ve reached out to them in the past to work on a project and when the need arose here recently, we reached back out in hopes they could help us.

Describe the project in detail.

I’d prefer not to talk I specifics.

What was the team composition?

QA team had a mgr and four other QA’s; two Sr and two mid-level plus one other senior consultant before augmenting our staff with additional QA.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

With the addition of the QA from Forte we were able to have one of our most successful releases on this application. The Forte QA was able to jump right in, learn the app, and get testing.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The Forte QA was able to seemlessly become part of our team

What did you find most impressive about this company?

My Forte representative; whenever I needed anything she did whatever she could to help.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not that I can think of right now