Public Sector

Application development teams in the public sector - whether they are building applications to support e-Government initiatives, or developing projects in areas like defense, security, health, and transportation - are facing an increasing need to be more agile, more cost-effective, and deliver higher quality software. Agitar has helped public sector agencies and contractors worldwide to dramatically increase quality and deliver applications on time.

Here's what they have said:

A government agency responsible for roads and traffic management was developing a large-scale, real-time traffic monitoring and management system with advanced mapping capabilities. They had experienced high defects rates during system and acceptance testing that had resulted in project delays due to extended testing and rework cycles. They decided to make changes to their development process, delivering features in smaller increments and committing to thoroughly unit testing each increment during development. They decided to use Agitator because it enabled their developers to do much more testing than they could ever do manually in the time available. They also deployed the Management Dashboard to give them visibility into quality and testing trends. The first release after the adoption of the new process and Agitator saw a 90% fall in the number of bugs uncovered during system test and the release was delivered on schedule (a first). The system testing manager commented that with this release, she couldn't break the system, whereas previously she had never gotten it to work at all.

A government contractor was charged with the task of coordinating the development efforts of six subcontractors in a highly distributed environment. The end project is used to collect battlefield data to reduce casualties and improve military equipment, so improving software quality leads to saving lives. The application collects data using a tablet computer and a Java-based web application, and processes it on servers closer to home. The project was fairly chaotic, and suffered from a lack of visibility into quality and progress across all project elements. Using Agile methods, iterative builds, and monthly SCRUM sprints, they were able to get better productivity. But JUnit wasn't enough, and they needed visibility and control spanning multiple contractors. Using the Agitator for test synthesis and the Management Dashboard to provide a consolidated view of test scope, depth, and results, they were able to increase testing coverage and dramatically reduce chaos in the project.