Our Process

Although most of customers found that productivity gains of outsourcing were better than expected including workgroup culture, documentation, expansion of skills and of course economics, managing off-shore software development projects was harder than envisioned especially for working habits, difference of process and methodology. The following is a standard software development process iSoftStone uses:

Actually many clients usually have mature methodologies for managing a project. Their processes and Methodologies sometimes differ from what is adapted in iSoftStone. in this case, iSoftStone will take Software-Capability Mature Model (SW-CMM) model as a common ground to communicate with customers to define and setup the required process. The basic key process areas are as follows:

• Project Process & Methodology Setup
• Project Planning
• Project Monitoring & Control
• Project Risk Management
• Configuration Management
• Quality Assurance

Our Management Tool

Engagement Management
Engagement contains not only the delivery phase of the whole project life cycle, but the activities with client from very beginning. The engagement management is critical to maintain a solid customer relationship, so we extracted the essential engagement activities and integrated into a software tool, which is included in our PSA (Professional Service Automation) system

Project Management
We have plenty of PMI certificated project manager who have a thorough knowledge of the project management theory. They are using Microsoft Project Server as their daily working tool for planning, tracking, time, resource and cost management. Our engineers also work with Project Server to report their task progress and get the recent update.

Knowledge Management
Knowledge is the second most important asset (next to the talent) for the company providing professional service like us. Knowledge management system can solidify the knowledge from everybody’s brain into a well-organized and retrievable document library so that this information can be retained and shared within the whole organization. Our knowledge management tool is integrated as a part of our PSA system.

Resource Management
Resource management is the crucial for us to keep a smooth business model and satisfy client’s need on time. So we use our PSA system to gather the information of the resource distribution and resource utilization periodically as a basis for our ensuing decision.

Configuration Management
Configuration management is the foundation of delivering a successful project and maintaining a valuable asset. We are managing three separate libraries for on-going projects, product asset and project baseline.

iSoftStone Collaborative Delivery Process (iCDP)

iSoftStone has developed a complete service delivery process, which is able to support its fast near shore/offshore business expansion.

This process takes a global view of the services and a local focus of delivery. It enforces delivery collaborations between teams through a project life cycle across locations and time zones. It uses iPSAPro? to provide system support to the entire delivery chain.

Our offshore development experience

Lifecycle Definition

Software development life cycle is critical for the success of the project. However, different clients have different understanding on the software development activities, and different clients have various requirements for the effort from us in the different phases of the whole life cycle. So in the beginning of the engagement we always sit with clients to discuss a mutual agreed cooperation model so that both sides can have a clear vision on the responsibility in the engagement.

In most of time, the discussions are around the accountability and detail design and testing activities. Some clients can delegate detail design work with their outsourced coding while others can’t. And some clients have strong willing to have their own testing to ensure the deliverable quality but some other clients only take the UAT (User Acceptance Test) as a product delivery checkpoint.

Communication

Since we are professional service provider in oversea outsourcing business, we can easily manage the time zone difference and language barrier.

Our staffs who work for offshore project have flexible working time; sometimes they need work in the different shift in order to hold phone conference with onshore team or clients. However, generally we still keep our normal working shift. We realized that the time zone difference is not a completely barrier for communication, so we can convert this to two shifts working model. For example, we can delivery coding artifact to our oversea client so that they can start their testing over the deliverables in our sleep time.

And we have a core team of project manager, business analyst and technical lead with good English communication skill. Some of them are native English speakers and some of them are bi-lingual technical or management expert with oversea working or study experience. So this team is playing an important interfacing role when we deal with our client directly.

We noticed that the status report is a significant practice to enhance the clients’ confidence and make them control the project progress. It becomes more crucial in the case of remote development, so our project management systematically arranged the daily reports, conference calls and shared website for status update.

Quality Assurance Process

Our Skills

Skills would cover:

• Application Development and Maintenance
• Testing Services
• Globalization and Localization Services
• Infrastructure Maintenance

Also we have proven experience in enterprise services:

• Office Automation Management (OA)
• Enterprise Application Service (CRM, HR, SCM, DRP, SMS, MIS etc.)
• e-Business (website)

iSoftStone's development team has both excellent skills and in-depth industry knowledge. Also, we know fully well how to integrate technologies with business practices. Technologies and skill set of our development team are as follows: