A major furniture manufacturer wanted to provide its distributors with a software package that would create orders, maintain inventory, receive shipments, and create reports for both sales and accounting. The software package also needed to enable users to order custom pieces, which would maintain the company’s primary competitive advantage. The project had a budget of $250,000 and a timeline of one year. Two years and $600,000 later, there were two failed rollouts, and the software was still seen as unusable and unreliable by the end users. The furniture manufacturer had lost the focus on its core business by unintentionally becoming a software company, and the executives wanted to get back to what the company did best--manufacturing furniture.

Understanding the Software Development Lifecycle
In this case, the existing processes for developing the software solution were not effective. Specifically, three best practices of software development were not in place. For one, Use Cases, which comprehensively define the requirements of the software system, were not being used to the fullest. For two, iterative development cycles were not having the desired effect. Finally, there was very little version control which, when diligently applied, tracks what is changed in each version of the software. Since these three best practices were not followed, versions of the software were being sent out before they were tested and features were being added without an understanding of the business needs. The project manager was reacting to problems instead of planning a successful project. ITAdvantage needed to bring a better understanding of the software development cycle to the development team to get the project on target.

Controlling the Software Process.
After the challenges were identified, the engineers from ITAdvantage set to work on improving the software processes. First, a new focus was applied to the Use Cases to ensure that legitimate business needs were being satisfied in the software’s feature set--any features that did not satisfy these needs were dropped. Second, much better measures were implemented to ‘‘beef up‘‘ the existing version control system. Of particular importance, two fundamental elements of version control were improved: 1) change and configuration management, and 2) testing and release procedures.

Improving the change and configuration management was critical. By controlling which changes were in which release, ITAdvantage was able to systematically identify and eliminate potential software bugs in an efficient manner. Too often in the development cycle, teams are choked with program bugs, and consequently lose their ability to quickly correct errors. ITAdvantage avoided this pitfall by implementing a systematic change and configuration management process.

By improving the testing and release procedures, ITAdvantage was able to control the stability of each iteration of the software, thus improving the quality of each iteration. This was done by creating test scripts and revising the existing release plan. The test scripts allowed the first round of tests to be conducted in-house, rather than in the field as had been the case. And the release plan was revised by cutting the number of iterations from one per week to two per month. This allowed more time for qualitative and quantitative improvements in each iteration.

The positive results of these implementations by ITAdvantage were threefold. First, with each successive iteration, the product became more productive and reliable. Second, the support for the application was reduced by 75%. Third, the client was able to dedicate more of its resources to its core business of manufacturing furniture. This third benefit was expanded when the client contracted with ITAdvantage for ongoing maintenance of the software. Now, instead of paying for variable and potentially very costly software maintenance, this furniture manufacturer has a small, fixed monthly maintenance cost. Once ITAdvantage was involved, this project was put on time, on target and on budget.