Northwest Cadence helps organizations manage and simplify their software development efforts so development teams can deliver applications more efficiently and organizations can meet their business goals. To address its customers’ needs, Northwest Cadence became an early adopter of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, taking advantage of integrated tools that help ensure the delivery of high-quality code and streamline development, with customers delivering business value 20 percent faster.
Business Needs
Northwest Cadence is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that specializes in helping organizations with their internal application lifecycle management (ALM) processes and with their use of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system. It works with large and midsize customers including government agencies, financial services companies, healthcare institutions, and retail organizations.
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With Visual Studio 2010, our customers are able to identify and eliminate waste, and they can speed the delivery of real business value by 20 percent or more.  |
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Steven Borg
Principal Consultant and Cofounder
Northwest Cadence |
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In its work with software development teams, Northwest Cadence has identified several emerging trends. These include challenges posed by global competition, tough economic conditions, and the need to control internal costs. There is growing demand from companies to implement ALM solutions that can reduce complexity while ensuring that stable, high-quality applications are delivered as quickly as possible to users. “For example, we have customers who are trying to move away from multi-repository ALM solutions, where project managers, developers, testers, and business analysts all have their own sets of information,” says Steven Borg, Principal Consultant and Cofounder of Northwest Cadence.
Lori Borg, President of Northwest Cadence, cites an example of the growing need for improved time-to-market for applications. “We have a customer operating in the Web space,” she says. “The company used to have application lifecycles of four or five weeks. Now it is looking at two-week release cycles, which reflects the company’s competitive business environment. It needed development tools that offer greater simplicity and integration while still providing a platform that supports its developers’ creative strengths and helps them to deliver quality code in an accelerated time frame.”
Solution
Northwest Cadence became an early adopter of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system, using it to assist customers with their internal development processes and application lifecycle management. Visual Studio 2010 provides a broad set of tools and functionality, including full support for multiple platforms, such as Windows-based PCs, the Web, cloud services, and Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies development. It also offers a rich development environment for thorough testing, database development, debugging and diagnostics, architecture and modeling, and lab management.
In addition, Northwest Cadence relies heavily on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to provide important ALM capabilities, such as version control, work item tracking, build automation, team portals, rich reporting, and business intelligence.
“The features of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 are incredibly important to us and to our customers,” says Steven Borg. “The reporting capabilities alone are powerful enough to justify using the system because they identify bottlenecks in development cycles. That helps developers eliminate manually intensive processes that are costly and time-consuming. More importantly, this reduces cycle time and speeds the delivery of customer value.”
Northwest Cadence also uses—and promotes to its customers—other new and enhanced features in Visual Studio 2010 that apply directly to code development. For example, with static code analysis, the company configures customizable rule sets that can be targeted to specific scenarios. It uses Architecture Explorer and UML 2.0–compliant diagrams to help customers understand their existing code. It also takes advantage of IntelliTrace, a new debugging tool that developers can use to quickly isolate points of failure within previously executed code and reduce the time spent on attempts to reproduce bugs.
Benefits
Visual Studio 2010 is helping Northwest Cadence position itself as an innovative partner for organizations seeking assistance with their application development processes. Visual Studio 2010 delivers simplified development procedures through tight integration of tools. It also provides powerful reporting capabilities that offer greater visibility into development efforts. Northwest Cadence has found that using Visual Studio 2010 tools can reduce waste and speed delivery of business value, helping customers streamline their business operations and deliver more value to their own internal and external customers.
Greater Simplicity with Integrated Tools
Steven Borg says Visual Studio 2010 helps development teams be more efficient by unifying tools within a single, tightly integrated development environment. “The strength of Visual Studio 2010, and of Team Foundation Server in particular, lies in its ability to pull all information into one location,” he says. “Information about every facet of version control is linked to work done by project managers, business analysts, developers, and testers. The pieces are all so well integrated that you can see across the breadth of the development lifecycle without a lot of manual effort or complexity.”
More Visibility with Rich Reporting
The rich reporting capabilities provided in Visual Studio 2010 deliver greater insights into the progress of development efforts, helping developers and business owners coordinate more closely to expedite application delivery. “Some of our customers deliver applications incrementally, and others may have development efforts that go on for several months,” says Lori Borg. “The reporting functionality provided by Visual Studio 2010 is huge because of the visibility it provides into what is going on at each step along the way.”
Better Business Value with Improved Productivity
The rich, unified tools of Visual Studio 2010 help Northwest Cadence shift the focus from detailed development work to higher level discussions that can help organizations understand the business value of their application development efforts. “We are really process people first, then developers,” says Steven Borg. “When we work with customers, we look at how to improve their business by improving development throughput. With Visual Studio 2010, our customers are able to identify and eliminate waste, and they can speed the delivery of real business value by 20 percent or more. They see a difference in both application quality and development throughput.”
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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published March 2010
