SE652 2007 Final Case Study

SE652 2007 Case Study

Overview

You have just been hired to lead the software development team for DBA, a small startup that develops high performance database applications (DB apps). DBA has been around for nearly a decade and was one of the pioneers in its product space. The development team has recently experienced quite a bit of churn as your predecessors were dismissed for failing to transition the team from an ad-hoc startup mentality to a high, performance software team who can consistently deliver high quality, high performance products on a timely basis.

Market Overview

The target market for your software is highly fragmented with no company commanding more than 10% share. The projected total addressable market (TAM) is estimated to be approximately $500M and is expected to grow at approximately 20% year over year (YOY).

Company

DBA is a privately owned concern funded entirely by venture capital. Its only products are the DB applications targeted at US and global Fortune 5000 companies. The company has a leading position in the DB App market place but has heretofore been unsuccessful in producing positive net income (current burn rate is several million dollars/year). The founders of the company were engineers with extensive DB app domain expertise who tended to focus on the core technology with limited focus on product usability and quality. The backers are starting to lose patience and are threatening to pull the plug (e.g. close down development & have a fire sale of the company's intellectual property) if you and the other members of the leadership team cannot start producing a profit.

Customers

As noted above, the customers are moderate to large enterprises who purchase DBA's DB Applications to help manage their data. While the applications are not absolutely crucial to their data warehousing operations, the customers look to the DB apps to reduce the cost of managing their data assets. Since the cost of the DB apps tends to be low compared to the overall IT operations spend, there is a reasonable willingness to pay if the applications can prove their value & payback (ROI). There are two key indicators of the product's success: initial purchase rates in response to Request for Pricing (RFPs) and since the applications are licensed, customer renewal rates.

Products

The DB Apps are highly complex and must interoperate with a myriad of vendor equipment and applications. The current core application is over two million Lines Of Code (LOC), much of which has been developed by engineers who are no longer with the company. An independent assessment of the software base has determined that the core application is well engineered and scales well across the full range of target customers, but the delivered quality is poor. The quality assessment has been validated by the lower than expected license renewal rates and anecdotal customer feedback. In addition, the rest of the leadership team has been very frustrated by the inability of the development team to deliver the committed features anywhere near the committed schedule dates (ie deliveries tend to be less than committed, later than committed and at a quality level that is less than satisfactory).

Product requirements are driven from several sources including the strategic focus as defined by the leadership team and customer specific features described in the RFPs. These latter requirements are almost always not in the initial release definition and are usually high priority and urgent as a sale is frequently dependent on inclusion of the feature. Release planning has typically been reactive and the latest "all-hands on deck" development virtually ensures that the next release plan will be more of the same.

Team

The development team consists of approximately 30 engineers spanning software and quality assurance. The team is geographically split between Boston, MA and Provo, UT. The team is currently in an all out push todeliver the latest product release and has been working 60-80 hours a week for the last three months.

Six months ago, coincident with the management reorganization, team morale hit an all-time low and many of the experienced engineers left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Your predecessor filled the gaps with extensive hiring, albeit with developers who had limited domain expertise and no experience with the code base. Subsequently, morale has slightly improved as the latest Death March release has actually been of the Mission Impossible type with success seemingly within their grasp. Still, some of the few remaining members of the original engineering team appear to be unhappy with the recent changes and may be taking a wait and see attitude with the most recent change (ie you) before deciding on their next career move.

Current Team Structure and Processes

As noted above, the development team is split across two locations. The team structure is relatively flat with several sub-teams led by team leads who also have development responsibilities. There is a part time project manager and a quality assurance team responsible for product verification and validation.

There are few standard processes in place and the team recently moved in the direction of performing formal change request tracking. Code inspections are done on an infrequent ad hoc basis. Formal project management was completely absent until the current release. You get the impression that the overall development strategy is mostly reactive with a bias towards testing in quality.

Objective

You are an experienced software director with extensive experience and many successful products under your belt. But, you have limited domain expertise with DB apps and are brand new to DBA.

Your objective is to transform the development team into one that can consistently produce high quality, market leading solutions on schedule and ultimately, deliver the product offerings that enable the company to become a high growth, profitable concern. Assume you have budget available to increase your development run rate by 10%-20%. Describe the steps necessary to shape the team, processes and overall plan to meet the business objectives, including (but not limited to):

Challenges

Hiring, staffing & roles

Product development life cycle approach

Portfolio management

Project management

Team organization, issues and development

Motivation strategies

Space & geography issues

Issues, risks and mitigations

Key processes

Measurement constructs