KSB Technologies

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the technical and operations director leading our customer engagements

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire KSB Technologies?

We were building a new DevOps pipeline using the latest IaC controls and best practices the KSB provided

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found a fully qualified resource in KSB that fitted our needs

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

This was at the delivery stage of the project and KSB brought their breadth of skills to an existing in place development team that contained many disciplines

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had one as a DevOps and Senior Developer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project was a great success and with KSB assistance we were able to ensure we met our deadlines and produce the quality solution as our customers expect

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Reliable team, very knowledgeable and collaborated well over teams calls being all remote

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The team had vast knowledge and experience in the Microsoft technologies

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

None

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Director of a software development company. Our services were utilised by Jaama. We worked very closely with KSB Technologies Ltd, working on the same fleet management software.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire KSB Technologies, and what were your goals?

Jaama's key flagship product provides superior integration, greater cost control, enhanced automation, improvement of fleet operating efficiencies and enhanced compliance management – all in one system. The goal was to provide new functionality and enhancements for individual clients , as well as reducing the volume of "bugs".

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Jaama selected KSB, but I have worked alongside KSB on previous projects and I recommended that KSB tender for the projects with Jaama. This was down to KSB's professional and structural approach to software development and the impact KSB has made on previous projects.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Working to agile ceremonies within an Agile approach to software development. Estimating/grooming sessions were undertaken to assess the scope of the work, complexity and time estimations allotted to each user story. User stories were broken down into manageable technical tasks, where acceptance criteria was determined with collaboration with business analysts and testers.

Technologies used were:

• .C#/VB.NET
• ASP.NET Core API
• ASP.NET Core Razor pages
• Entity Framework Core (Code First)
• TFS
• Agile (SCRUM)
• Unit testing (NUnit)
• SQL Server
• Infragistics

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There was one full stack developer that I worked with from KSB.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Provided major functionality across to multiple clients, whilst operating from one code base. This was a significant challenge but was provided with ease. Bug list went down from over 100 bugs to below 5, a much more manageable state.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We had daily stand ups, worked to 2 week sprints which was also the same timetable for the release frequency. We used tools such as JIRA/Confluence for management of user stories and processes, and kept all details within a JIRA task.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They provided some unique approaches to problem-solving and using the experience from previous clients, used some of these techniques to our advantage, such as approaches to refactoring legacy code whereby some functions could be over 1000 lines of code. Breaking these down and providing tests to help with this process really benefitted the refactoring of the code.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There was a steep learning curve to learn the system and the industry, so allocating some dedicated days to this would have been very advantageous. As it happened though, KSB managed to handle everything thrown at them, even with the challenging learning curve so it wasn't really a major issue.