The Client:
The client is an application services and marketing company that provides products and services to meet the needs of active lifestyle organizations worldwide. The application aims to provide easy access to training information for self-coached athletes, including nutrition tracking tools. It also provides coaches a way to interact with remote clients, easily manage large groups of clients, and quickly build training programs and practice schedules.


The Challenge:
A co-development project, it had additional complexities emanating from evolving requirements overlapping with the design phase. In addition, certain interfaces were meant to connect to applications that were not accessible to the development team.


The Solution:

• Development was done using iterative development cycles with 4 week iterations to allow absorption of the impact of evolving functional and technical requirements
• Dummy services were created to mimic the missing external applications
• A DB schema synchronization process was created to ensure the changes from either team were available to both the teams
• An SCM plan was created for source synchronization that resulted in no overhead to the client, with Sopra India team managing the process.
• Automated unit testing of components was implemented with more than 90% code coverage

Technology Used:

• JEE 5 Technology, with JBoss 4.0.4
• Apache Struts as MVC type II presentation framework
• JSP for presentation
• JDK 1.5, EJB 3.0, JDBC,
• Database – MS SQL 2000 Server
• Testing Tools/Frameworks -JUnit, JUnitEE
• Bug Tracking Tool – Bugzilla
• Configuration Management Tool – CVS
• Development IDE – Eclipse WTP version
• Build Tool – Ant

Sopra India Benefits:

• Best practices like “Doneness checklist” to ensure that evolving system requirements did not have an unmanageably adverse impact
• Quick team ramp up to meet the evolving project requirements with the help of buffer resources
• Frequent checkpoints in the delivery cycle to ensure that all stakeholders were able to share ideas, opinions and thoughts