Case Study: $1 Billion Video Game Software Developer
One of the top five video game developers in the United States, with a market capitalization of almost $1 billion, uses NetResults Tracker to track and manage software defect reports throughout the product life cycles.
The Problem
The video game market today is a $20 billion industry, with growth rates projected at over 40% through 2008. This opportunity has intensified the level of competition in the industry, and a game developer’s competitive advantage has become increasingly tied to its ability to develop and release titles quickly. An important component of an efficient development process is a method to ensure that the inevitable defects that arise during development are reported and fixed in a timely fashion.
Before using NetResults Tracker to manage their software defect reports, our customer’s development team faced the following challenges:
- A new defect could be discovered by any member of the team – a manager, a Development Engineer, a QA Engineer, a Build Engineer – or even one of their video game customers. The company had no method to ensure that new defects would be submitted to the appropriate Development Engineer to be fixed, and sometimes defect reports could become lost among the many tasks competing for the team member’s time and attention.
- Once a defect report was submitted, a manager’s oversight was necessary to ensure that the problem would be routed in a timely fashion from one engineer to the next to be fixed, tested and finally released into the software build. The lag time inherent in a manual task routing and management process sometimes produced unnecessary delays in release schedules.
- As is often true for many software development organizations, the company’s engineers were located in multiple geographical locations around the world, with the development team based in the Mid-West and testing operations in Southern California and Asia. Resolving a single defect report therefore required task routing and knowledge sharing among engineers who worked in different time zones and spoke different languages.
- The team’s managers did not have visibility into the number and nature of the reported defects in a software build at any given moment. Without the ability to identify bottlenecks in fix processes or view trends in the types of defects being reported, managers were having a difficult time devising strategies to reduce the number of defect incidents in their development organizations.
The NetResults Tracker Solution
To streamline its defect report management process, the company decided to use an issue tracking system. After an extensive evaluation of the products in the market, the company chose NetResults Tracker based on its ease of use, product reliability, and rich set of functionality.
Installation
The deployment process was complete in only a few hours and consisted of a few simple steps:
- Easy installation of the NetResults Tracker software at the Mid-West headquarters onto a standard web server linked to a standard database
- Creation of user accounts for the team, with no need for individual desktop software installation. The initial number of users was 30 but soon grew to almost 700, as more and more managers began to observe NetResults Tracker’s benefits.
- Quick start using the out-of-the-box templates included with the software. Managers customized the data fields, workflow, email notification rules, etc. as necessary using NetResults Tracker’s intuitive GUI.
High Functionality and Benefits
All team members, whether located in the Mid-West, Southern California or Asia, could access NetResults Tracker from any workstation using a standard web browser, and now:
- Any team member could report software defects into the NetResults Tracker application, which would in turn route the report to the appropriate person responsible for scheduling or commencing the fix.
- Each time a task (such as a fix or test) was completed, NetResults Tracker would automatically route the task and send an email alert to the next team member responsible for contributing next, according to the workflow rules that had been set by the manager.
- As tasks were routed from person to person, engineers were able to attach to these tasks Microsoft Office files or URLs pointing to the relevant source code, thereby providing easy and instant access to the data relevant to the next person in the workflow and minimizing confusion and search time.
- When a task was routed from a Development Engineer in the United States to a QA Engineer in Asia and vice-versa, nothing was lost in translation, as NetResults Tracker’s concurrent multi-language support capability allowed NetResults Tracker to be configured to display all field label text in both English and Japanese at the same time.
- The Development Engineers in the Mid-West were able to use NetResults Tracker’s discussion group capability to communicate and share task-specific knowledge with the QA Engineers in Southern California and Asia through a common platform, eliminating the need for costly meetings and difficult-to-coordinate conference calls across multiple time zones.
- Project managers had a tool to reinforce the desired process for managing defect reports to ensure compliance, a way to track the status of all defect reports at any given time to identify process bottlenecks and a tool for viewing aggregate process trends to aid in project planning for the future.
Business Benefits From NetResults Tracker
After using NetResults Tracker as their defect report management system for just three months, the company noticed pronounced benefits arising from:
- Increased Productivity: Managers were now relieved of the task of manually routing defect reports from one engineer to the next and could spend more time developing new product features and architecting new projects.
- Better Compliance: The automated routing and tracking system ensured that all reported defects were fixed, tested and incorporated into the build according to a uniform process.
- Better Communication: Engineers across departments and geographies were able to share knowledge and relevant data quickly and efficiently.
- Improved Product Quality: The efficient process for managing all reported defects led to more robust software builds and faster release times.