Readify Software Vendor Speeds Testing, Improves Collaboration, and Wins New Business

Readify, a software vendor based in Australia, performs most of its consulting work at customer sites, billing on a time-and-materials basis. To appeal to customers who need high visibility into the development process for cost-estimation purposes, Readify wanted to be able to re-create customer environments and perform the work in-house on its own virtual machines. Readify deployed Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. Now, Readify can accelerate virtual machine setup, teardown, and restoration to known states by managing multiple virtual machines as a single environment. For one project, build creation activity that used to take a full workday can now be completed within 10 minutes. Readify is also improving collaboration within its teams and with customers, and it is winning new business.

Situation

Readify provides software architecture, design, development, and training services to corporate and government enterprises of all varieties and sizes. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Readify is based in Melbourne, Australia, and employs about 75 people.

Before, creating a suitable build environment … took a full workday. With Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, we can be ready to go in 10 minutes or less.  Jason Stangroome Senior Developer Readify

In 2008, Readify began studying how to provide an additional offering that would meet the needs of customers who wanted more predictable costs. One option was to perform most or all of the work at Readify, but that required the ability to emulate customers’ environments on Readify virtual machines. An early attempt to do this with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 development system proved impractical.

“Managing all of the separate virtual machines that we needed was a messy process,” says Jason Stangroome, a Senior Developer for Readify. “For each different test case, we had to spin up each virtual machine individually, arrange them into the necessary tiers, manually configure the needed states, and move data around from one team member to another. We realized that all of this was going to take too long and be too error-prone to justify making it a standard new offering for customers.”

Readify decided that the new offering would require a lab-management solution that could ease the management of virtual machines and accelerate setup and teardown during testing. The solution also needed to work with Microsoft Visual Studio, the company’s primary application-development tool set.

Solution

In 2009, Readify began evaluating beta versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. The company quickly saw that improvements and new capabilities in these products would help overcome the obstacles that had previously made the new offering impractical.

“We were particularly excited about creating and managing virtual machines for testing and then exposing parts of the virtual lab to our customers’ testers,” says Stangroome. “We realized that this solution would let us do almost all of the work on a project at Readify and then hand it over to our customers when it was done.”

Readify deployed the beta software in November 2009. The company is already using the solution for three ongoing projects and anticipates growing customer interest in the new offering.

Improvements in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 work item management and reporting make it easier to report on progress to project managers, analysts, and other stakeholders more frequently.  Jason Stangroome Senior Developer Readify

With the new solution, Readify can manage multiple virtual machines as a single virtual environment. By using Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, Readify hosts the virtual environments and manages them from a central console. With Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Readify associates the virtual environments with the rest of a project’s artifacts in a team project collection. And by using Microsoft Test Manager 2010, the company creates, starts, and runs tests on the environments. Developers can take a snapshot of an entire environment at any point in time and use the snapshot to communicate rich bug information and automatically return the environment to a clean or other desired state as needed.

Readify is also improving its design and development processes with Microsoft Expression Blend 3 design software. Instead of creating mockups outside of the development environment and sending them to developers for coding, designers working with the Expression Blend 3 WYSIWYG interface produce usable project resources that developers can work with directly.

The company finds it easier to plan projects and search for information with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, which supports creating hierarchies, dependencies, and other relationships among work items. Team members can use simple or complex queries to filter work items, such as searching for all user stories that do not yet have tests associated with them. They can share work items and work item queries by e-mail messages or hyperlinks.

Readify teams also have access to default reports in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, or they can create their own reports with familiar programs such as Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet software. Customization options include very specific controls concerning how reports are run, displayed, and delivered to different team members. Reports can be viewed in e-mail messages, on project portals, or on project dashboards. Because Readify follows the scrum agile development framework, teams are also using the new agile planning workbook to create and manage user stories and backlogs and to break projects into iterations. An iteration backlog helps Readify plan its sprints and track progress toward their completion.

“Everything is working well with the new solution so far,” says Stangroome. “In addition to making it possible for us to offer the new form of engagement we wanted, it’s already changing the way we work across the board. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of all the new capabilities it provides.”

Benefits

The new solution is helping Readify accelerate software testing, improve collaboration, and plan more easily for iterative development. As a result, the company is strengthening its competitive advantage and winning new business.

The agile planning tools in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 put everything we need in one place and help us achieve a much smoother workflow.  Jason Stangroome Senior Developer Readify

Speeds Testing

Easier virtual machine management and build provisioning is contributing to substantial timesavings for Readify. “One of the main benefits of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is the ability to manage several virtual machines as a single environment,” says Stangroome. “Prior to the new solution, we could have created something similar, but it would have been a time-consuming, error-prone process.”

As an example, Stangroome notes an ongoing project that Readify recently migrated to the new solution. “Before, creating a suitable build environment for that project took a full workday,” he says. “With Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, we can be ready to go in 10 minutes or less. That’s a huge amount of time to return to an employee, who can then engage in more productive work and speed up project completion.”

Strengthens Collaboration

With the new solution, collaboration among Readify team members is stronger than ever. “Having designers work in the same code base as developers with Expression Blend 3—and making it simple to share resources through Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010—is a big advance,” says Stangroome. “In the past, designers and developers tended to have very different workflows, and if developers needed something from designers, they had to request it and wait for them to respond. Now, handover time is greatly reduced because we can find the resources we need when we need them.”

Designers and developers aren’t the only ones who are working together more efficiently. “Improvements in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 work item management and reporting make it easier to report on progress to project managers, analysts, and other stakeholders more frequently,” says Stangroome. “The more information we can share about a project, the faster we can respond to problems or change directions if needed.”
 
The solution has also improved collaboration between Readify and its customers. “Obviously customers need to be able to perform their own testing and quality assurance on anything we build for them,” explains Stangroome. “In the past, we could make components of the project available for customer testing only toward the end of the process or under very specific conditions. Now, we can expose Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 over HTTPS, giving customers access to work items and test cases and the ability to trigger builds and lab deployments.”

Eases Agile Development

The agile planning workbook in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 makes it easier for Readify to plan for the incremental, iterative development that the company prefers. “We have a project team that is using the agile planning workbook to set up its sprint iterations,” says Stangroome. “Based on my experience roughing out planning documents by hand or customizing Excel spreadsheets for this purpose, it is a huge help to have these capabilities available right out of the box and integrated with our development tools. The agile planning tools in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 put everything we need in one place and help us achieve a much smoother workflow.”

Helps Win New Business

Readify is already gaining new business and improving its competitive advantage. “Because Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 make test execution and build automation so much simpler, we can re-create customer environments on our own virtual machines and do most or all of the work here,” says Stangroome. “By doing the work in-house, we can use the solution’s reporting capabilities to provide customers with more detailed insight into our progress and a much firmer estimate of what the final cost is going to be. That’s going to be very appealing to customers who are struggling to shrink their budgets during these tough economic times. We’ve already engaged with three new customers through this model, and we expect interest to grow.”

Whether Readify consultants are working in-house or at customer sites, the new solution helps them increase their efficiency and productivity, further increasing value for customers. “With the expanded set of tools and features in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010—especially easier project management, hierarchical work items, better reporting, and simpler provisioning of build servers—it is much easier for us to produce high-quality products,” says Stangroome. “That gives us savings we can pass on to our customers, which increases our ability to outbid competitors.”

Stangroome says Readify will encourage all of its customers to adopt the new tools as soon as possible. “Anyone who does any kind of development work, whether internally or for customers, is going to benefit from the many new features and capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.”

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For more information about Readify products and services, call 1300 666 274 or visit the Web site at:
www.readify.net

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated development system that helps simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, modeling, and design tools that help you bring your vision to life. Work within a personalized environment that helps accelerate the coding process and supports the use of your existing skills, and target a growing number of platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and cloud services. Also, work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that you can use to find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high-quality solutions.

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Document published April 2010