O'Dwyer Software

Please describe your company and your position there.

Mozilla is a free software company. We have many products including the well known Firefox web browser. I'm currently a Lead on the SRE team.

For what projects/services did your company hire O'Dwyer Software?

An internal system for managing CI data for across all of our projects.

What were your goals for this project?

To add new sizable features, improvements and speed up performance.

How did you select this vendor?

They were recommended by a contact in my network for being experts at Python and JavaScript (which happens to be our tech stack).

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We have a system for managing CI data for Mozilla projects. We needed a long list of improvements making to the system, to improve both performance and add new features.

What was the team composition?

We have a flat structure, five developers and utilise Agile methodologies.

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

Developers across the company use our reporting tool. They've given feedback that the tool is much improved since this partnership, especially the performance improvements which was a real pain point previously.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project was delivered on a constant iterative basis, with updates published multiple times a week, which we would then give feedback on.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are open, opinionated, and crucially know their stuff. They asked the right questions to make sure they were producing the right thing first time. This is important to us as misunderstanding of requirements could delay progress significantly, we're very happy we didn't run into this with O'Dwyer Software.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing, the entire team were very happy with this partnership.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was previously the CTO for an information technology company.

What challenge were you trying to address with O’Dwyer Software?

We had to design a Python system to authenticate people using facial recognition.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We developed the proof of concept rapidly. We had open-source Python, which was version 2. This was a challenge because we needed to Python 3. They migrated to Python 3 well and moved us to a more efficient way of doing the analysis and training methods for facial recognition.

What is the team composition?

We worked with one person directly.

How did you come to work with O’Dwyer Software?

I was looking specifically for some skills in this area. There weren’t a lot of people with those skills at the time, so there was a strong demand for those skills. They also needed to deliver in a short time frame. I went through an agency to find them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent less than $500,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from February until September 2019.

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

We had to get to a trial of the system in the US, so we had to complete the solution before that. They did that successfully. The system performed well too.

How did O’Dwyer Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They met our deadlines and worked well with the members of our team including full-stack developers, Android developers, and iOS developers.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to get the job done was good. We used agile methods and they were okay to adapting to those. The other aspect is their delivery; that was the key thing.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t think so. This was a challenging timeframe with technologies that needed to be adapted, and they just got on and did it.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be very clear about the scope and what needs to be delivered. That worked well for us.