Celenia Software uses AQdevTeam to manage their software development and administrative operations. Alexei Karas works full time for Celenia and is also a long-time AQdevTeam enthusiast and a member of TeamAQA. Alexei handles all support for AQdevTeam at Celenia and he recently shared some details about how it helps them manage their processes.

Overview

Before Celenia started their projects in Kiev, Ukraine, it used a simple home-grown issue-tracking system that was sufficient for a limited number of projects that were done by a small number of developers. When the new projects were started in the Kiev office the situation changed. "From the very beginning Celenia paid tremendous attention to their projects’ quality. A projects definition of quality included not only bug hunting, but following the software development life cycle (SDLC) with a more complex interaction between all project team members. In this environment our old issue-tracking system was not able to satisfy the company’s requirements and the investigation started to make a decision to modify the already existing system or to replace it with a new one.

"AQdevTeam was not the only system that was considered, but at that time the company already had some experience with AutomatedQA's TestComplete and AQtime products and participated in beta testing AQdevTeam. This experience was really positive and together with the quality and responsiveness of AutomatedQA’s support it was considered a big advantage, but this was not the only reason why the final decision was made in favor of AQdevTeam."

In the early 90's Alexei worked for someone from the production area who was fond of computers and had a clear understanding of what software he needed and how he needed to use it. Once he said to Alexei: "All of these programs are nice, but they must help me do my work faster without spending extra time learning how to use it and how to fit my activities into their functionality."

"This is exactly what AQdevTeam gives to its users. We already had established processes that we followed during the development, so, during the evaluation we paid more attention to if it was possible to adjust the software to follow our processes than how we should change our processes to utilize the functionality provided. AQdevTeam not only gave us everything we needed, but also demonstrated big potential for when the company started to grow, and we knew that this would start in the near future," said Alexei.

Process Management Tool and Customers

Celenia now uses AQdevTeam as its process management tool. It is not only used for internal purposes, but, due to the existence of the Web Interface and granular security model, several customers were granted access to the company’s databases, thus making it possible for them to not only directly report the problems found, post their suggestions and change requests, but to be included in the overall process. "They can communicate very closely with the people working on their items and see the status for each item whenever they need," said Alexei.

Celenia and AQdevTeam

Celenia has four AQdevTeam databases that are used by different divisions. Alexei said that the item types implemented in these databases support many of the processes that exist in the company. "We have item types that support the lifecycles for the internal and external problems reported. The item types combined with extensive scripting support such processes as Change Request handling; the chain from Requirements down to Test Cases and execution results for these test cases (of course with coverage matrices and Test Case execution report generation); collection of the timing statistics (historical experience) to help team managers with time estimations for new projects; life cycle for the development team member daily tasks; internal notifications about implementation changes and some other processes."

"Last, but not least, we use AQdevTeam's wide set of operations within the Macro Builder to implement the build procedure for the company’s products that are now treated as legacy, but are still supported."

Worry Free Environment

"Despite the fact that all of our databases contain almost the same entities (called Item Types in AQdevTeam), the entities have a different set of fields and different workflows to match specifics for each division. All of our AQdevTeam databases at Celenia are not "frozen"; they are ever evolving as the company or division processes change. Again, this extraordinary flexibility allows division managers a worry free environment where they do not even have to think about whether something can be implemented in AQdevTeam or not, but formulate their requirements exactly as they need them, making only slight corrections during the implementation stage," said Alexei

AQdevTeam Provides Confidence

Alexei described what they received after implementing support for the company’s processes with AQdevTeam. "On the first hand this is CONFIDENCE. Now, everyone who is working on a project can be sure that no problems are left unattended and no changes go through a release and by-pass relevant Test Engineers. We are confident that all tasks were done and everyone can easily see the testing results and be sure that nothing is released without proper testing and verification. All of this has explicit and implicit consequences. Explicitly, having processes and their support in place improves the overall quality of the solutions and decreases their time-to-market readiness. Implicitly, the fact that the company takes care of the SDLC and supports and follows it, definitely gives it more "points" in the customer's opinion."

Recommending AQdevTeam

"I have presented AQdevTeam several times to different people and every time I told them that they should not treat AQdevTeam as a simple bug tracking tool, but as a process management tool that can handle many processes that exist in any company, even if these processes are not related to software development. To illustrate this please view the Maximizing AQdevTeam: Creating Custom Item Types article by Robert Leahey, it describes how to use AQdevTeam to handle reimbursable expenses, or look at the implementation of the recruitment process support that we have here at Celenia. AQdevTeam is a tool that you definitely should try if you are serious about process support for your company."