Project Title: Maintenance of telecommunications software

The Challenge

In 2003, one of the world leading providers of telecommunication software solutions involved Artezio into maintenance and enhancement of a mature software product whose active development phase ended 7-8 years ago (not too obsolete by the telecommunication industry standards). It was an element management system -- a client/server software product that provided provisioning, administration and memory restoration support for network elements in a telecommunications network. It supported a broad range of network elements including digital cross-connect systems (DCS), add/drop multiplexers (ADM), digital loop carriers (DLC), digital loop equipment (DLE), and dense wavelength division multiplexers (DWDM) manufactured by a variety of vendors including Lucent, Advanced Fibre Communications, Fujitsu, Alcatel, Tellabs, Cisco, Cyrus, and Nortel.

This product made a good candidate for offloading part of its maintenance and evolutionary development to a lower cost offshore outsourcing vendor. Global delivery was an attractive option for a number of reasons. Firstly, product complexity was less than average compared to other telecommunications software made by the client, which promised to make knowledge transfer easier and less costly. Secondly, product evolution in the past few years had been fairly rapid due to the need to support new network element models released by vendors every year and to maintain interoperability with numerous upstream operation support systems (OSS). Lastly, for this product, the client had been supporting less functionality with more full-time in-house staff compared to its other products, thus making partial reliance on the cost cutting global delivery alternative very attractive.

Artezio's role was to create a dedicated team of developers and testers that would become a virtual extension of the larger product team at the customer headquarters in the U.S. Artezio's planned contribution was to develop plug-ins for new network element models that come out in dozens every year, incorporate new features into the software as requested by the client, correct defects, develop test cases, and run regression and new feature testing. In addition to Artezio involvement, client's own developers were expected to be responsible for a large portion of maintenance load. The client's software release schedule had a new commercial release each quarter.

The Solution

At home, Artezio allocated separate premises with locked access and an isolated LAN specifically for the purposes of this project. It assigned 25 experienced software engineers whose responsibilities included writing software code, writing up test cases, and testing. Although they represented a small fraction of the customer product team consisting of over 100 professionals (including marketing, training, and management), their share among software engineers was more significant. At the initial stage of the project, some of Artezio engineers attended training at a client's facility and acquired a better understanding of the product itself as well as of upstream service order provisioning systems and integrated end-to-end solutions for telecom operators that the product was a part of.

Developing software for the telecom industry requires highly qualified software engineers with the knowledge of circuit switching, signaling, network protocols, network equipment and other industry specific issues. Artezio developers working on this project had years of experience in C/C++, HP-UX 11i, Unix Message Queues, Distributed Computing Environment RPC, high availability clustering solutions (such as HP Serviceguard), CORBA, Java related technologies, Oracle database and network management protocols such as TL1 and SNMP.

Software development process at Artezio was organized around completing detailed technical requirement descriptions for new features that client's software architects periodically sent down to Artezio for implementation and testing. Artezio used its broadband fiber optical Internet connection to acc

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