Serengeti has offered a solution in the form of collaboration that works based on our unique team extension model. Since audifon had no experience in outsourcing or distributed software development, the knowledge and experience that Serengeti has in that segment was of great benefit. The two Serengeti ambassadors worked for three months at Koelleda at the audifon headquarters. Following the best practice of team extension model, initial ambassadors have been doing testing to get acquainted with the application and work processes, to be gradually included in the development of new functionalities. One of the main features of the team extension model is flexibility in team development, so several weeks after returning to Zagreb, additional developers and testers were added. In the first stage of onsite work, the user was getting familiar with Serengeti engineers and gained the trust that is the foundation of successful co-operation. audifon was sceptical of how efficient the Serengeti team would work in remote location, however, because of the good preparation and proven work model, moving to the remote location was smooth and the team quickly achieved full productivity. In the ambassador's selection, Serengeti considered the specificity of the health industry and selected people with previous experience in the industry. This has enabled the ambassadors to get to know the specific business needs of the user faster and to make the transfer of knowledge and getting into the job more efficient and quick. One of the ambassadors later became team leader of Serengeti team and knowledge of the health industry greatly improves his work.
The team in Zagreb works as an extension of the German team, which consists of 2 parts, a development team and a testing team. The idea is to maximize the possibility of parallel implementation and testing of agreed functionality.
Work tasks are defined by the client and then all of them are presented in classic sprint planning to all members of the team. Depending on the workload and capabilities, all members of the development team take over tasks independently.
This includes detailed testing, from the unit tests during development, to the manual, integration, UI tests and the system tests, depending on the particular task and degree of risk for the end user. This is all implemented using Team Foundation Server as a platform for continuous integration through multiple builds that run daily.
The Serengeti team leader primarily helps other team members with all issues they have, while any additional communication with their German counterparts is rather regular and informal. Most of the team members communicate with client on a daily basis, also if needed more than once a day, all in order to respond quickly to any problems and ambiguities. In this way we try to be maximally effective.
