Cost-Effective Development of a SaaS Product for Labor Market Analytics

Customer

The Customer is a US-based startup focused on labor market software.

Challenge

The Customer planned to launch the development of a SaaS platform that would collect and analyze employment and salary data, and reflect it in personalized dashboards to help businesses enhance their recruitment and retention strategies. The Customer’s team was experienced in design, DevOps, and data analytics, but they couldn’t cover other aspects of the project: development and QA. They also needed assistance with technical product management. However, the Customer didn’t want to hire needed resources in-house as the process would be too long and expensive, and could endanger their preferred time-to-market.

Cooperation

ScienceSoft offered an optimal model of outsourcing to collaborate with the Customer’s team and share responsibilities for the project – a self-managed dedicated team.

To launch the project quickly, we started with a core team of a project manager, a business analyst, a QA lead and a development lead, and then added 6 developers in 2 weeks. In the course of the next 3 months, the team scaled up when needed to support a steady development pace.

The development was based on the Scrum methodology with 1-3-week long iterations to adapt to the Customer’s frequent change requests. We plugged into CI/CD pipeline established by the Customer’s in-house team to deliver code changes reliably. For the flexibility in planning and reflecting shifting priorities when needed, our BA defined requirements for each increment via requirements elicitation sessions with the product owner on the Customer’s side. Quality of the delivered functionality was honed with manual testing and unit testing activities.

To arrange a shared product vision and effective work throughout the project, we created an all-round collaboration environment. ScienceSoft’s project manager used such tools as Confluence and Aha! to reflect the product roadmap and the team’s progress on aligning to it. SharePoint was used for streamlined project document management and storage. For smooth change management, we established the pull request review and approval process. All change requests were tracked through Jira for better visibility.

Transparency and ongoing collaboration of our team with the Customer’s in-house team were ensured with code collaboration in Bitbucket, daily calls and frequent messaging in a joint project chat in Microsoft Teams and ad-hoc calls to resolve issues.

The project manager reported weekly on the work progress to the Customer. We set a comprehensive KPI system to constantly demonstrate the quality of our work. The main KPI that our team successfully adhered to throughout the project was keeping the number and severity of bugs below a predefined level.

Results

Thanks to the speed and accuracy of our team during 1-year long cooperation, the Customer together with ScienceSoft delivered the product on time and on budget and was able to confidently fill the marketing niche with their labor market software.

Technologies and Tools

Project management and collaboration: Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Aha!, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint.