A Distressed Telecom Software Company

Your Profile

A 10-year telecom software company had a productivity, quality and delivery problem.

Your Problem

The error rates for this software company had become unacceptable. Changes to the software were slower and slower to make. The code base was growing rapidly. There was a programmer turnover problem at the company. The errors were so numerous that even extraordinary efforts couldn't get everything fixed within an acceptable time frame. Some customers were threatening cancellation.

At its root there was a software architecture problem. Above that there was a major software process problem which resulted in disastrous quality as perceived by customers. And time was of the essence because customers were threatening cancellation.

Our Solution

People

ShouldersCorp brought in a world class audit team: a management consultant and executive with 20+ years of software management; a professional architect and project manager with 13+ year of software experience; and an expert with 20 years experience with this particular type of telecom software. The audit team was brought in for a week to do a full assessment of the situation and to develop a plan.

Approach

The plan involved radical immediate changes to process including getting all code under tight configuration control, identifying especially error-prone modules in the system, doing comprehensive code reviews of all error-prone modules, radically altering the quality and release control process, and providing substantial on-site support for the customers.

Simultaneously a parallel effort was begun to improve the architecture of the software products and to reduce the "code bulk".

Results

In a period of six months, the customer satisfaction problem was "fixed" with nine of ten customers. The cycle time to use the software had gone down ten to one. The code base was under complete control. The perceived quality of the software zoomed upward. The turnover problem went away. And most importantly, significant progress was made toward migrating the software to a more flexible and maintainable software architecture.

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