Hire Dedicated Developers / Programmers and Teams

• Technologies and platforms: PHP, Laravel
• Team size: The Team Lead, 7 programmers, and 2 QA-engineers
• Site: www.Insly.com

Our client is a global insurance software development company (1.6M+ EUR  in revenues in 2016) with a team of dedicated insurance and IT professionals working in London, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Warsaw and California, USA.

Global insurance market is constantly growing. There a lot of brokers, insurance companies and their customers. Our Client aims to integrate them all into intermediary Insurance SaaS platform. Today more than 120 brokers in over 30 countries use its in-house made solution and their amount is constantly growing. The Client asked us to enlarge his team with the help of dedicated software developers from our side to speed up the process of maintaining his system and adding new complex custom features to it.

CHALLENGES

• Our dedicated developers needed to plunge fast into the existing product, its business logic, architecture features and coding standards to be able to maintain and customize it;
• Our Client has its own developers and we need to adapt with them, to become a part of ONE team united by a single goal;
• The main customers of our Client are Managing General Agents (MGA) (insurance intermediaries, who have underwriting authority from insurers). The uniqueness of this SaaS platform is that our Client can customize the product to meet specific demands of its customers. The challenge is that initially the “Core” of this application was designed as a slightly scalable Monolith, hence adding any new functionality to it is a non-trivial task, because customization can disrupt the whole system.

OUR SOLUTION

• Agile-based management (one-week sprints with reports);
• Implementing AutoTesting-First Approach (using selenium testing, unit and behavioral testing), continuous integration to be sure that customization does not break any part of the Monolith;
• Implementing Code reviews. That means that code of a certain developer must be checked and approved by two other experienced developers or the team leads. It helped to increase the general quality of code.
• Using microservices architecture and refactoring anywhere it is possible. For example, we used Laravel to create insurance calculator to speed up the quote calculation for brokers who also use this SaaS system. With microservices, it is easy to test API calls and create documentation for new functionality;
• Maintaining the code of the Monolith written before us (bug fixing);
• Maintaining the synchronization between crucial databases.

ADAPTATION AND WORKFLOW

The Team Lead, 7 programmers, and 2 QA-engineers represent our team of developers. The Product Owner and the Scrum Master from our Client’s side control the development process. Using of Skype, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Confluence provides effective communication between us.

The adaptation period of the team of our developers with the workflows and teams of our Client was about 2-4 weeks.

The development management is Agile-based. That lets constantly discuss the implementation of new tasks and features, and then successfully cope with them within a week. Each task of our dedicated team should be resolved by Thursday evening. The duration of one sprint is one week, so releases take place every Friday.

All the tasks have 4 statuses: 'to do', 'in development', 'needs to review' (require merge request), and 'resolved' (‘Implemented, but needs to be tested’, ‘in Live’, or ’Completed’). The Team Leads organize daily stand ups at 11:00 to monitor how the development process is going: what tasks have been done, what tasks are planned to be implemented today, and what problems have to be solved.

Our developers go on business trips to the Client’s office when it is required to discuss new important ideas, share mutual experience or participate in development of new features as a part of mixed team.

• Technologies and platforms: Yii Framework, PHP, AJAX, MySQL, iOS, Android
• Team size: Project Manager, 2 Team Leads, 10 Yii developers, 3 mobile developers( Ios, Android)

CUSTOMER

The relationship with customer started in 2011 year. The customer is the USA based company with approximately 50 dedicateddevelopers in the USA, 100 dedicated developers in Poland.

OBJECTIVE AND DEDICATED TEAM FORMATION

Why did customer come to Belarus? We think that partially because of some Belarusian advantages and also because he has been working with another Eastern European country - Poland. Additionally the customer was in need for inexpensive (in comparison to Poland) but reliable team of developers.

After negotiation with Belitsoft and other vendors, Belitsoft won the race and contract was signed. To increase chances building up a successful team, Belitsoft was able to provide proven and reliable Project Manager, Team Leader and Senior developer who has been working for Belitsoft several years and which formed backbone of the team.

RESULT

With 15 dedicated developers on board in Belarus, our US client can handle quite big and complicated Yii projects. 

Customer is extremely happy with the team of our PHP Development Company and to show his respect he sends presents and bonuses to most proactive and professional members of the team on a regular basis. The good thing is that average cost for Belarussian team member is only 42 000 USD/year (as per 2014 year) and this helps to save about 60 000 USD per developer or about million of USA dollars a year! Overally we think that it’s a great success and a good example how to get inexpensive, high-quality and fast development.

• Technologies and platforms: ASP.Net MVC, RoR, Java, Ajax, Angular JS, HTML/CSS, MSSQL, Oracle
• Team Size: Project manager/ Business analyst, 3 Team Leads, 16 developers

CUSTOMER

This company has its own products for organizing international calls and a lot of internal ERP and CRM systems for managing sales and financial activity with its direct client, dealers, and resellers (a few million users in total).

OBJECTIVE

Customer wanted to outsource some of his development needs to the company, which will be able to work in overlapping NY hours, providing the best possible results and organizing the whole process according to the special corporate policy.

The initial cooperation was based on Fix Price type of contract. Our company has developed several projects in short terms, using our best developers, project manager and testers. During some period of time the management from both sides decided to intensify cooperation using more effective and visible model of work – Dedicated team. The main reasons for that were:

• To keep developers who already worked on their projects, only for Customer projects.
• Dedicated team model provides the best pricing for the Customer interested in long-term relations with the only team.
• Quick team growth and assurance that new team members will be used only on Customer's projects allowing them to work more efficiently when understanding Customer's business.

SOLUTION

Our main proposal was to start using our reliable employees, who can be as initial core / leaders for growing teams. This approach was successful for both parties. It helped us to provide the Customer with perfect results at the initial and later stages. Those core developers were able to select (after approval from customer’s side) the appropriate specialists according to the customer’s requirements (proven working experience, good communication skills, fluent level of English and etc.) and lead them to deliver good service, programming.

RESULTS

We've been cooperating for more than 2 years already and we’re going to continue working together. Dedicated team model goals of work (such as stable team, a good understanding of customer’s business, quick growing, reliable communication and etc.) were achieved with this Customer.

• Technologies and platforms: SharePoint 2007-2013, SharePoint Online, Office 365, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, AJAX, MSSQL, WebParts, MS VisualStudio, Sharepoint Designer
• Team size: 17 IT Specialists - PM, developers, support, quality assurance experts.

OBJECTIVE AND VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS

The Customer’s objective was to build Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) product based on SharePoint that can be utilized in both educational and private sector.

To develop such a system the Customer wanted to engage an outsourcing  nearshore partner as costs for developers are high in the Northern European countries. Customer was in need for a reliable software development provider from the Eastern European region. Belitsoft was chosen as:

• There was positive experience and trust build while working with us before that project.
• Belitsoft was able to start development quickly as we have provided 2 experienced .NET/ SharePoint developers within a two weeks after signing a contract.
• Belitsoft was able to provide competitive prices as customer wanted to build long-term full-time team working only on his projects.
• Team augmentation and the whole process of work were transparent. This assured Customer that he will get good specialists at pre-agreed rate.

RESULT

The development was started on SharePoint 2007 platform by 2 developers. The team started to grow continuously to support increasing customer's requirements in additional functionality, support of existing code and additional platforms (SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Online).

Currently the team is about 17 people where 1 Project Manager, 9 developers, 4 Quality Assurance Specialists, 3 Support Specialists. Belitsoft's pool of available .NET developers, front-end developers, designers and other available specialists are used, where additional efforts are needed.

Belitsoft and Customer have started collaboration in 2007 and due to successful products developed in Belitsoft the Customer became Microsoft Strategic Partner, Microsoft Gold partner and received numerous awards from Microsoft. Based on our analysis of Northern European expenses for full-time employees, we can proudly say that we were able to decrease yearly customer’s expenses by 40-50% of the development costs which are more than 600 000 USD currently.

• Technologies and platforms: Wordpress, HelpDesk, GoogleDocs, GoogleAnalytics, Skype
• Team Size: 2 Support / Marketing Specialists

OBJECTIVE

Customer wanted to form his support team by young, initiative and smart people with good level of knowledge of media marketing, international communication, customer support and fluent English. Customer would like to involve reliable outsource partner with proven records to organize this support center. Using good recommendation from our clients and partners, customer has chosen our service and after short and productive negotiation process the collaborative work has begun.

SOLUTION

We proposed Customer to gather his team members according to his special Job / skills requirements. We were able to propose more than enough potentially good candidates in the shortest terms of 2-3 weeks. Using our feedback and recommendations for each proposed candidate, Customer interviewed the most appropriate and promising of them. As a result and within 3 weeks customer selected 1 person and within other 3 weeks – another one and thus we have made quick start of his offshore team in Belitsoft. Also we provided the Customer with high level of administrative management from our side, to make sure that the initial stage of cooperation went well and goes according to promised quality points. In 2014 during a business trip to YouTube office in London our employees have successfully passed the Google test and received their certificates (YouTube Certified employee). The certification was done in strive to help our customer.

RESULTS

At the moment our cooperation lasts for about 2 years and we granted to our Customer excellent support/marketing dedicated specialists who show great results and provide employer satisfaction.