User Seminar in the Taiwan Silicon Valley region
As a CodeBeamer reseller in Taiwan, it was great to finally meet Intland’s CEO, Mr. Janos Koppany when he came to visit. We started to work with Intland in 2003. However, it was the first time that we met Mr. Koppany face to face at the end of February 2009, just several weeks ago. Earlier, we communicated with Intland by phone or Skype, or web meeting, and mostly, through CodeBeamer. Thanks to CodeBeamer being easy to use and maintain, it was not difficult for us to learn CodeBeamer directly from CodeBeamer support portal. Besides, it is effective to track questions, customers’ change requests, and bugs through CodeBeamer. We provide market and customer feedback through CodeBeamer tracker, and we experienced CodeBeamer’s improvement version by version. Functions like workflow, project template, tracker template, SCMLoop, lookup fields, managed Subversion repository have been added over time... Different licenses have been introduced in response to market demand. Our daily work also depends on CodeBeamer. We use it for technical support, marketing, sales lead collection and trace, knowledge collection and sharing, as well as basic office administration.
The morning after Mr. Janos Koppany arrived in Taiwan, we held a customer information exchange seminar at a meeting room near Hsinchu Science Park, the Silicon Valley of Taiwan. After Mr. Koppany’s presentation, SPC BU of Qisda (an OEM company that is part of the BenQ Group), NCTU (National ChiaoTung University), and ArdenTec all shared their excellent experiences using the CodeBeamer. When I say what they shared was “excellent”, I don’t just mean that they really applied CodeBeamer to improve the management of their development teams, but they all took a very serious attitude in the way they approached system implementation to ensure success. Finally, their presentations contained well organized content, and they were very generous in sharing their CodeBeamer experience with other people who attended the seminar.
For example, SPC (Scanner/ Printer/ Copier) BU of Qisda shared the fact that they audit all the necessary documentation and source codes with identified stages in the workflow. They include the complete dates of all the audit artifacts to make sure every step is noted either as having been tested or not, and that all documentation is done correctly. Especially for the release tracker, CodeBeamer’s SCMLoop function makes it possible to associate Subversion tag and commit codes to tracker items. In this way, users can easily trace back and forth amongst commit codes and bugs/tasks, as well as trace tag revisions with release tracker items. In order to make sure task progress is under control, Qisda SPC BU won’t allow an unit task to need more than a week to complete. This is to prevent “too late to catch up or fix” problems if problems or delay are found two weeks later. Qisda SPC BU also generates various reports in Excel by using the collected information capability from CodeBeamer in order to project or produce progress overview.
National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) uses CodeBeamer for the development and outsourcing of its school administration system. It also uses CodeBeamer for lab management. With CodeBeamer, the project manager communicates with the systems administration users and tailors the requirements into functional units. In addition to CodeBeamer, NCTU also uses UML system to strengthen the traceability between the source codes and the requirement units. After NCTU’s presentation, some enterprises in the audience wanted to get more information from the NCTU student who is in charge of project management.
ArdenTec IT Dept had tried several different tools, including open source systems as well as enterprise class software, before using CodeBeamer. They finally moved most of their data and management to CodeBeamer, because CodeBeamer offered enough functionalities needed for development, maintenance, and customer service. In addition, CodeBeamer is easy to maintain and not difficult to learn. Because they are very disciplined when it comes to recording all the process and configuration on a centralized management server, it took them only half a year to pass ISO27K.
When it came to recommendations on how to raise the successful rate of implementing a system like CodeBeamer, most users recommended:
- It’s very important to get support from the top manager.
- Since it is important to keep on production while implementing systems, don’t expect to use all the functions at one time. You can apply more and more functions over time, project by project.
- It’s important to cultivate engineer’s user habits with daily reminder and encouragement by the management After a while, when engineers are used to getting on the system daily, the manager will only need to modify some small behavioral errors.
All the above customer sharing PDF for this seminar can be found at ESAST Support Portal User Experience.
(Shared by ESAST CO LTD, Agent of CodeBeamer in Taiwan.)
Posted at 01:39PM Mar 30, 2009 by Yu-Shiu Lin in Customer Stories | 0 Comments