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One of the pioneers in enterprise social community and workforce
collaboration software, Telligent helps companies worldwide to implement social
communities for their employees, customers and partners. Its powerful community
development platform allows customers and partners to customize their community
experiences and build award-winning applications on top of the platform. With Telligent,
thousands of organizations worldwide have created successful communities that drive
collaboration, communication, innovation, networking and support, including American
Marketing Association, Dell, Microsoft, Psion, APAN (a branch of U.S. Department
of Defense) and more.
The value of Telligent's software to users has been recognized in the reports of
leading research agencies, such as Forrester Research and Gartner. In the latest
Gartner report, Telligent was named a visionary in both the Magic Quadrant for Externally
Facing Social Software and the Magic Quadrant for Software in the workplace.
The release of the new product versions of Telligent Enterprise
and Telligent Community stimulated the company to staff up the project team quickly.
The executives of Telligent already had a successful experience of outsourcing for
other projects, and it didn't take a lot of time for them to choose an outsourcing
company. "We had a tremendous experience with Murano's software engineers on a previous
project," said Jim Holmes, the company's director of quality, "Because of the success
we've seen with Murano Software's specialists, we considered the possibility of
bringing Murano on board as a quality assurance resource on the new project." Telligent
extended its team with three experienced Murano QA engineers who quickly integrated
with the existing team and helped provide a high-quality level of software throughout
the whole development process.
Murano's QA engineers have become an integral part of the Telligent team.
They have been successfully working on exploratory testing and writing manual test
cases. They also took a central role in getting Telligent automated test coverage
over 13,000 Selenium automated web UI tests. Apart from the excellent professional
skills, among the major qualities of Murano's engineers, Holmes also mentions self-motivation
and the ability to learn quickly and to work with minimal direction. "They're all
capable of quickly taking my hints and moving off to do terrific things. I cannot
overstate this enough: all of them have helped Telligent transform how we build,
test and ship our software," he said.
According to Holmes, working on Telligent's project would offer a range of technical
challenges to any QA engineer. Telligent's products are extremely complex and have
a broad test coverage matrix that includes three server operating systems, two database
server versions and a broad range of browsers and other moving parts. "I've thrown
a number of hard technical challenges at all of our Murano team members, and they've
surpassed my expectations," Holmes said.
Murano's engineers had to quickly blend into the intense communicative process
with developers, project managers and team-leads, as well as with Telligent's support
department. The entire team participates in daily Scrum-style video called standups,
frequent chats via Skype or IM throughout the day, and e-mail discussions. "Our
Murano team members took up all of those communication challenges with gusto. They've
been great at interacting with the rest of the Telligent team, despite the differences
in time zones, cultures and languages," Holmes said. "Murano's QA's quickly adapted
to our development process, as it was evolving. Moreover, they have given me great
feedback about many aspects of our process to help improve our environment."
The successful cooperation resulted in high-quality new versions of the products,
enriched with new and useful features.
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Top 3 reasons to choose Murano specialists, according to Jim Holmes:
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High competence and an impressive set of relevant skills at the start
of the relationship.
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Minimal language barriers. |
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Professionals who care very much about what they do and love learning
how to do it better. |
Working with a distributed team may be a real challenge, but if you follow these
easy tips, your efforts will be rewarded greatly.
How to manage
a distributed team:
Common approach for everyone.
Treat the remote workers exactly like you would if they were part of the team you
have in your physical work center. Give them the same challenges, opportunities
and empowerment you give your direct employees on your team.
Appreciate the trusting environment.
Work hard to foster a trusting, highly collaborative environment with your local
and remote team members. If your remote workers don't interact as a united team
with your in-house workers, they will be reluctant to come up with great new ideas.
Visual aspect of communication is critical. Include remote workers
in every possible productive team meeting you can and pay the costs to get a reliable,
performing video conferencing solution in place. You absolutely need to be able
to form associations with your remote folks, and the visual aspect is critical.
Time-zones matter.
Respect your remote workers' time as much as you do with your in-house team. You
will likely need to flex your work hours to compromise with theirs. You shouldn't
expect your remote team workers to stay up until 10 p.m. every night to attend a
daily or weekly status meeting.
To sum up, don't ever treat them as some group of isolated people
you simply throw tasks over a wall to. They're not. They're part of your team. The
closer you bring them in, the more rewards you'll see.
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Murano team members quickly adapted to our development process, as it was evolving,
and have given me great feedback about many aspects of our process to help improve
our environment."
