Founder and Team Mediation on Processes and Technical Debts of Industrial Security Product

Manual Testing Services, IT Consulting, Project Management, CI/CD Implementation & Modernization. DevOps Services, Early-Stage Innovation, R&D Services

Our client is an engineering company implementing complex projects in automation and industrial equipment optimization. They help businesses optimize production lines, leverage security in specific areas and buildings, improve maintenance efficiency, and digitalize processes.

The client’s product is a complex integrated software system that controls engineering equipment at industrial and civil facilities. It collects, monitors, and dispatches data received from physical devices (controllers, sensors, circuit breakers) connected to it via an industrial protocol.

To scale effectively in the commercial sector, the client needed not just a stable product — they needed a transformation in how this product was engineered, delivered, and perceived. The real challenge lay in bridging the gap between ambitious business goals and a development process that struggled to support them. JazzTeam was brought in to lead this transformation — culturally, technically, and organizationally.

The client’s system had already been used at several commercial facilities, and the company’s goal was to increase sales in this sector. This implied continuous accumulation of business requirements for the system and required stable versions of the application that could be demonstrated to potential customers.

The client addressed Jazzteam as they constantly faced problems in the development process that could critically affect the achievement of the set goals. The team and the management mentioned the following concerns:

The company aimed to acquire practical knowledge about how both management and development teams can successfully promote new processes, effectively build departments, and apply new best practices and approaches.

Our goal was to leverage a technological breakthrough on the project by enabling process leadership and keeping the core team with their expertise.

Our main task and challenge were to comprehensively implement best engineering practices at the level of the company’s culture and to instill our values in their work. The client’s team, in turn, needed to accept and apply these practices in their future work to successfully achieve the company’s goals together.

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As part of IT consulting services, JazzTeam held many events with our client’s development and management teams. We chose a strategy for a complete and detailed immersion into the team and the project itself. Our consulting expert needed to communicate not only with the top managers but also with the technical leaders and developers, participating in stand-up meetings and involving the entire team in transformation activities.

PROJECT TASKS

Implementation of test automation and CI/CD on the project, as well as transfer of best engineering practices at the level of the company’s culture

Constant failures to meet deadlines and release delays

No practice in using the Definition of Done

Many processes are manual

Each team member’s areas
of responsibility are fuzzy

SOLUTION STEPS

• 1
  Deep immersion in the project and identification of the team’s main problems
• 2
  Development of a strategic transformation plan and its agreement with
the company's management
• 3
  Implementation of the strategic transformation plan Conducting daily stand-ups with the participation of the management and the entire team Holding meetings on a regular basis (daily meetings with the management, team technology meetings, one-to-one meetings with all the technical leaders)
• 4
  Setting up the automated testing process and developing first Unit tests
for the server part of the application
• 5
  Conducting retrospectives on the project
• 6
  Implementation of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
• 7
  Transfer of knowledge to the customer's team Creation of all necessary documentation (project console), recommendation of specialized literature for advanced training of employees on the project

RESULTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

• 
  The process of Continuous Integration (CI), as well as test automation
on the project were implemented
• 
  Test management and release management processes became fast and optimized
• 
  Regular and high-quality product deliveries to end users are ensured
• 
  The team is stable and motivated. Increased engagement and responsibility for the result

Block diagram: Implementation of test automation and CI/CD on the project, as well as transfer of best engineering practices at the level of the company's culture

In the course of data gathering, while communicating with all the client’s team members and analyzing the product itself, our experts identified the following issues in the project that potentially hindered the company’s development and growth:

The good news is that the client team recognized these issues and was open to adopting a more qualified approach that would help them improve their processes and increase the quality of the system’s delivery and support.

After deep immersion in the project and identifying the main problems of the team, we decided on the following consulting tools to implement:

The consulting process included the development of a strategic transformation plan, which our team presented to the company leadership. This plan included the following activities that needed to be introduced to the client’s team and development processes in general:

We introduced daily stand-ups of the entire team, including engineering, analytics, design, and testing departments, with management from the first day of consulting.

Our goal was to encourage everyone to show their leadership skills and not be afraid to stand up and proactively ask questions. We highlighted the value of these meetings as a tool that would help them eliminate possible bottlenecks and sync with other team members.

One-on-one meetings with technology leaders were aimed at placing the right focus on the development and were mostly dedicated to the employee incentive scheme.

It was also important to engage technical leaders in communication with non-technical decision-makers to bridge the gap in understanding why particular technical decisions are made.

Despite general meetings, we also conducted a retrospective event and provided a guide to a dedicated retrospective facilitator for future events.

We conducted some restructuring processes, such as team reorganization by the Feature Team approach, and the creation of a professional QA department, to speed up the development process and improve cross-functional collaboration.

We created the necessary documentation with the most important information about the project for a smooth and quick onboarding of new team members. Together with a recommended literature for self-learning on various topics, such as project management, testing, or CI/CD, and our consulting meeting records, we put the documents in a newly built project console with fast access.

Despite the implementation of work on technical debt, we also developed a strategy for CI/CD processes implementation and first Unit tests for the server part of the applications. During stand-ups with developers and managers, JazzTeam experts emphasized the importance of creating different types of autotests and regularly demonstrated the value of this practice, showing that it’s within the team’s power.

During and after consulting services provided by JazzTeam experts, we’ve seen significant improvements in our client’s processes and work environment.

First of all, the team switched to the iterative development model. Now, each sprint is planned and all tasks are evaluated before planning, estimation is applied, and large tasks are decomposed.

After each sprint, the team records metrics for changing the code coverage and constantly monitors the growth trend, thereby motivating the team. Two key parameters are used as reference metrics: general code coverage and code coverage of the business logic module.

Secondly, we and our client also noticed how newly introduced stand-up meetings brought transparency and efficiency to the development processes. With our checklist, the stand-up facilitator can hold meetings in a live format with excellent timing (~30 minutes) for a team of more than 20 people.

In the meantime, the introduced retrospectives helped to identify, process, and propose a solution to the most exciting issues, including the issue of constant team members’ overtime work.

As we’ve changed the format of demonstrations based on the sprint results, now the whole team participates in the demo, and the results are demonstrated by the developers. So the team’s involvement and responsibility for the result increased.

A “Task Readiness Criteria’ document developed by our team solved the problem of the task completion definition. Now, each task includes a checklist with criteria, and any failure to comply with it is highlighted at stand-ups and then returned to the developers for revision. QA engineers are continuously monitoring the criteria fulfillment.

We introduced writing Unit tests by the team of backend developers on an ongoing basis, which helped to detect bugs and system instabilities at the earliest stages. We also implemented automated deployment of the client and server parts of the application to workbenches and added versioning to releases.

The role of the QA engineer on the project became even more important. They now also participate in sprint planning, demonstrations, and control over the task completion criteria. We introduced a preliminary analysis led by QA engineers, as well as requirements testing before transferring to work, along with test documentation and test management systems.

A project console with all the necessary project documentation was created and is constantly updated, thereby accelerating the process of new employees onboarding.

DevOps: CI/CD Basics CI/CD Advanced; Docker
Infrastructure: GitLab CI, TestLink, Postman, Jira, Confluence.
Protocols: HTTPs, GRPC