4-page Case Study - Posted 12/19/2008
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Lending Services Firm Aligns Application Lifecycle Management with Business Goals
LSI is a leading provider of property valuation, title and closing services to the mortgage lending industry. With help from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Neudesic, LSI replaced disparate software development project-tracking and management tools with Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008, an integrated application lifecycle management solution. The development system supports the entire development process so that it’s easier for LSI to provide audit reports and scales to maintain numerous branches of software code for more reliable builds. Now, the development teams at LSI can create higher-quality builds more efficiently, collaborate more effectively, and document the process to comply with strict guidelines. The solution also supports a customized Scrum process methodology to better align development efforts with business goals.
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Visual Studio Team System brought the entire software development lifecycle together in one unified environment so that we could configure workflows and manage everything in one system. |
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Sean Souther, Vice President of Product Execution, LSI |
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Situation
LPS is a leading provider of integrated technology and services to the mortgage industry, offering solutions that span the mortgage continuum, including lead generation, origination, servicing, portfolio retention, risk management, and default. These solutions are augmented by the company's award-winning customer support and professional services. Approximately 50 percent of all U.S. mortgages are serviced using LPS's MSP platform. The company was spun out of Fidelity National Information Services in 2008.
Since 1967, LPS’s LSI Division has provided products and services to help real-estate companies increase the efficiency of title, escrow, and appraisal processes. LSI builds and maintains several popular software products for the mortgage industry and vital tools for internal use that help the company provide cost-efficient and reliable mortgage processing services. About 70 people work on software development at LSI, including developers, testers, architects, and project managers.
In 2003, the development organization at LSI started with just six people. As the group grew rapidly over the next several years, LSI purchased a release-tracking and code-management toolset. These tools promised to provide traceability for changes and defects in compliance with Statement on Auditing Standard for service organizations (SAS 70) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).
“Our previous tools were complementary, but not well integrated, so our developers still had to leave the development environment sometimes to manage code,” explains Sean Souther, Vice President of Product Execution at LSI. More importantly, the code management database began to show signs of strain as the number of project teams and code branches expanded. “With up to six teams working in parallel on a single product, we broke the code management system when it came time to merge the branches,” says Souther. “We would end up with bad builds because the code management database wouldn’t report conflicting files, and then we would have to go back and fix the problem. Because of this issue, we would occasionally miss our release date.”
Moreover, the system did not support the full development process, so project teams spent a significant amount of time entering project status into various
| Size of software development team |
70 people |
| Estimated time to complete |
4 months |
| Developer tools |
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server |
| Costs avoided |
U.S.$40,000 in application lifecycle management software upgrades |
spreadsheets and other tools. If audited for SAS 70 or SOX compliance, project managers would need to recover the appropriate documentation from multiple locations.
In 2007, LSI adopted a version of the Scrum agile development methodology, which aims to deliver production-ready results in sprints (periods of weeks) to ensure better alignment with business goals. Although this methodology helped LSI better align business needs with software development, the company still lacked a fully integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) solution that would simplify processes and record-keeping and increase the reliability of software builds.
Solution
After consulting with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Neudesic and performing some product testing, LSI chose Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008, an ALM solution that encompasses code management and supports agile process methodologies like Scrum. Many LSI developers were already licensed to use Visual Studio Team System 2008 under their subscriptions to MSDN®, the Microsoft Developer Network, so the company only needed to add client-access licenses for business stakeholders and project managers.
“Visual Studio Team System brought the entire software development lifecycle together in one unified environment so that we could configure workflows and manage everything in one system,” says Souther. “In addition, with the incremental client-access licenses required, adopting Visual Studio Team System cost approximately $40,000 less than upgrading our previous products.”
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We have much more confidence about our release date goals now that everyone’s efforts are properly integrated. So far, we haven’t missed any of our release dates with Visual Studio Team System. |
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Sean Souther, Vice President of Product Execution, LSI |
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Common Environment
To help teams improve collaboration, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server combines project management, work-item tracking, version control, reporting and business intelligence, build management, and process guidance. With Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, stakeholders and project teams throughout the company have access to information appropriate to their roles in the context of familiar tools. For example, LSI developers can complete source control management tasks directly within the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment, and business stakeholders can check the status of their projects through project portals.
Process and Tools Customization
LSI and Neudesic planned to migrate software development for the company’s ClosingStream™ Web-based closing application to the new solution first. Taking advantage of the process flexibility allowed in Visual Studio Team System 2008, Neudesic created a custom process template that reflected the Scrum workflows at LSI, shown in Figure 1. This template builds on top of the Scrum for Team System template developed by Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Conchango.
“The processes at LSI are a bit more complex than with most other groups simply because it needs to comply with various industry and government regulations and track many more aspects of the process,” says Pete Klein, Director of Connected Systems at Neudesic. Neudesic also created custom controls in the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer and in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Web Access, as shown in Figure 2, so that team members could more easily link sprint backlog or bug work items to requested or planned releases.
Deployment on Shared Infrastructure
When deploying Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, LSI wanted to take advantage of existing infrastructure to simplify maintenance of the solution. Neudesic worked with infrastructure teams at LSI to distribute various server components of Visual Studio Team System onto production systems, including components like Windows® SharePoint® Services team sites, Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services, and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.
By running Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server on production systems, LSI simplifies access for numerous business stakeholders throughout the organization since they can easily access status and reports from familiar project portals.
Benefits
Having migrated two of its major software development projects onto Visual Studio Team System 2008, LSI avoided more than U.S.$40,000 in software upgrade costs. In addition, the company realized significant process efficiencies, greater reliability of its builds, and easier access to current and historical project information for reporting and audit purposes.
“Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server encompasses our entire software development lifecycle so that we are not using a variety of tools and entering project status into several tracking systems,” says Souther. “The solution does a tremendous job of supporting our agile development processes.”
Improved Collaboration
When LSI project teams used spreadsheets and various tools to report and track status, there was risk of errors and miscommunication. But, with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, LSI project team members can enter and receive updates of each other’s work with greater reliability and accuracy. Instead of sending an e-mail message to the project manager when a work item is complete, developers can now simply check in the code in Visual Studio Team System 2008.
Neudesic and LSI took advantage of the extensibility of Visual Studio Team System 2008 to customize the solution so that it fully supports the use of Scrum at LSI. As a result, the already in-place Scrum processes can better support workflows, improving efficiency.
Collaboration is also more efficient with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. Only three weeks after migrating its main development project to Visual Studio Team System, LSI reduced administrative overhead on the project by 20 percent.
“Teams have much less project management overhead than before,” says Souther. “Previously, when I came out of a planning meeting at the beginning of a sprint, I needed to create the sprint backlog in a spreadsheet and in the ticketing system. Our developers needed to enter their hours for a project into the spreadsheet. At the end of the sprint, our project managers had to retrieve the tickets associated with the sprint, and then reconcile the hours recorded on that document with the various spreadsheets. Needless to say, we’re much happier now that this information is centralized.”
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With Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server, I can meet an auditor’s request simply by printing the entire history of a change. |
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Sean Souther, Vice President of Product Execution, LSI |
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More Stable Builds, Reduced Rework
LSI is now able to produce high-quality builds that accurately reflect project teams’ latest revisions. The version control in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server facilitates regular integration of software code. “All the problems we had with branching in the previous system went away with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server,” says Souther.
The Scrum process at LSI breaks up application development into three-week to four-week sprints, and at the end of each sprint, the team merges the code to produce a final version of the build for business review. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server helps the team track code changes associated with particular work items and easily ensure all scheduled changes have been included in the new build.
“We have much more confidence about our release date goals now that everyone’s efforts are properly integrated. So far, we haven’t missed any of our release dates with Visual Studio Team System,” says Souther.
Better Visibility and Accountability
LSI centralizes project tracking and workflow on Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server for the entire lifecycle of its applications so that information resides in one place. SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Windows SharePoint Services provide a way to easily create and manage reports and simplify business intelligence.
“On the business side at LSI, the goal of Scrum is to keep software development more closely aligned with frequent releases and provide greater visibility into the process,” explains Klein. “The reporting and visibility that is possible with Visual Studio Team System supports that goal by involving and informing everyone—including business stakeholders.”
Simplified Audits
With Visual Studio Team System, LSI can respond to audit requests more easily, saving time and avoiding audit exceptions. “We recently had our SAS 70 auditor come in to ask about the history of particular changes,” says Souther. “Because we had not yet migrated that project to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, the project manager needed to compile information from three sources to satisfy the request. With Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server, I can meet an auditor’s request simply by printing the entire history of a change.”
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world's most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development lifecycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced with Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft Expression Suite. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about LPS’ Lender’s Service, Inc. division’s products and services, call (800) 756-3524 or visit the division’s Web site at:
www.lendersservice.com
For more information about Neudesic products and services, call (800) 805-1805 or visit the Web site at:
www.neudesic.com/
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
