Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
Because this is considered a mission critical application for us, I would say Honeycomb is contributing heavily to the success. They have not only been involved with helping develop new features, but they’ve also gone back and helped do a full suite of regression tests and locate a large number of bugs that were in the system previously. They’ve helped us not only identify those but also fix them along the way.
They’ve also been contributing heavily to the underlying architecture of the system, which is improving the functionality from a maintainability standpoint as well. It’s really helped us improve the overall stability and long-term maintainability of the application.
How did Honeycomb Software perform from a project management standpoint?
We really wanted someone to come in and be integrated tightly into the team here, instead of just staff augmentation. We dictated to them that we wanted to operate in an Agile way, including a Scrum process every single day.
They’re 7 or 8 hours ahead of us because they’re in Ukraine, but have remained flexible. They have aligned themselves with our project management style pretty easily. That said though, I’d like to think that from a development project standpoint, we are operating on a pretty standard Agile methodology platform. It wasn’t that big of a stretch for them to fit in because they had some experience with Agile and Scrum leading up to this.
Is there anything Honeycomb Software could have improved or done differently?
I don’t have a good answer for that one. I’ve been pretty happy with the cadence so far. They were extremely flexible with fitting into our management style. They’re flexible in the sense that if I have to make changes throughout the course of a given sprint, they don’t hesitate to help out.
Do you have any recommendations for others considering working with Honeycomb Software?
We operate using Agile and Scrum, and I think they fit into that methodology quite well because they are contractors. My advice would be to try using Agile in a very consistent and forceful way because it works very well with them.
I realize there is a time zone difference, which is one of the challenges we typically have here because we are in the Midwest and they’re in Ukraine. Prepare yourself accordingly, and work within that confine, and things will go well.
I think a lot of people are worried about overall communication when working with an offshore firm. I will say that their English has been extremely well, and there hasn’t really been much of a communication issue.
Honeycomb Software successfully met deadlines. The project was managed with excellent communication. Their team was great.