Software Team Augmentation [Case Study]

Leading trend analytics and forecasting company in the UK.

Client

The client is a leading trend analytics and forecasting company from the UK. The company developed a cloud-based web platform to provide businesses with expert insights and consulting on market trends. Blue-chip brands in retail, design, and tech, including Samsung, Adidas, LG, and Starbucks, tap into the platform’s resources to better understand consumer needs, lifestyles, and expectations. Using these insights, future-oriented brands can improve their product strategies and create engaging experiences and services.

At the end of 2020, when remote working was already a new norm, the client decided to explore the benefits of offshore IT outsourcing and software team augmentation. They set a goal to scale up their US-based development team and hire experienced engineers from top nearshore/offshore locations. This would allow them to speed up project development all the while maintaining cost efficiency and high quality of deliveries.

Senior full-stack, QA automation and DevOps engineers integrated into the client's tech team.

Our role

Digiteum was assigned to qualify several senior software, QA and DevOps engineers to strengthen the client’s development and support teams based in the US. Our goal was to find highly-qualified specialists who would seamlessly integrate into the client’s teams and could adjust to the West Coast working schedule.

We kicked off with one skilled DevOps engineer and further augmented the client’s team with senior full-stack and QA automation engineers who contribute to the development of the most critical parts of the web system.

Once we joined the project, the client could restructure their full-stack development teams and create an effective agile workflow that significantly accelerated project development (approx. 2x).

Blue-chip brands tap into the platform’s resources to better understand consumer needs, lifestyles, and expectations.

What we did

Our engineers contribute to the development, testing, and support of the core components of the web system: React-based editor, customer-facing web portal for the end-users, and AWS infrastructure and services.

Senior full-stack engineer on our end works on the development of the web editor that allows 250+ industry experts, content managers, and analytics to create custom reports and rich content in 6 different languages.

Senior QA engineer works with an agile development team and contributes to the development and optimization of the user-facing interface and the key platform’s functionality and features. The role of a QA engineer is not only to continuously support the agile development process but also to work out an effective testing strategy, integrate test automation/regression and other modern testing technologies as well as collaborate with the support team to ensure impeccable quality and user experience of the system.

DevOps engineer contributes to the support and optimization of a scalable AWS infrastructure and helps set up an effective deployment/delivery process.

Our engineers contribute to the development, testing, and support of the core components of the client's web system.

Results

From the beginning of this collaboration, the client significantly increased the speed of development and could surpass delivery goals for 2021. In only one year, they:

Completely rebuilt and deployed a new feature-rich web report editor
Developed critical functionality for effective content creation and management (import, image edit, edit modes, publish, etc.)
Added a range of collaboration and social features (sharing, collaborative writing, notifications, etc.)
Integrated image import pipeline and localization tools for multilanguage support
Enhanced user account and pages with new features and personalized content
Improved on-site search engine
Boosted performance and improved resource management by setting up a reliable and scalable cloud-based infrastructure
Integrated modern engineering, testing, and deployment practices into the development process

This is the first software team augmentation experience for the client, and it turned out to be a complete success. The company seeks to expand collaboration with offshore/nearshore developers for the long term.

The client doubled project development speed thanks to tech team augmentation.

About global trend insight platform

The client leverages large data sets from multiple data sources (social, search, sentiment, etc.), proprietary data pipelines, and forecasting algorithms to create quality trend insights and content.

Hundreds of market experts and analysts transform this data into drillable reports, visualizations, presentations and forecasts available to the platform’s customers on a subscription basis.

Customers access market analytics, trend reports and personalized content on a user-centered web portal equipped with a range of useful features — download, compilations, search, personal pages, etc.

Highlights

IT staff augmentation for a US-based tech team to speed up and enhance project deliveries and set up an effective agile development process.
3 senior engineers (full-stack, QA automation, DevOps) integrated into the client’s project to develop, test, and support an AWS-based web platform for trend analytics and forecasting.
Modern tech stack, development frameworks and tools: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Storybook, GraphQL, AWS, Jenkins, Docker, New Relic, Elasticsearch, Selenium, Playwright, Locize.
Latest engineering practices: CI, unit test, regression tests, etc.