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Embedded Systems Design

Calsoft Labs provides services in areas that include embedded hardware design, embedded software design, device driver development to validation and verification. more

Case Studies

Fully Outsourced Quality Assurance Lab for a Firewall Switch

Summary

Calsoft Labs has setup and been successfully running a fully managed offshore QA lab for a leading Telecom/Networking OEM to test and do QA for their high performance multi-gigabit firewall which is based on the Check Point®’s NG technology.

Challenge

When the client approached Calsoft Labs, their existing testing and quality assurance activities for this product were spread between two sites. Some in-house resources were being used for testing and automation. Another offshore vendor was being used for resource augmentation.

Calsoft Labs was providing software development service through an offshore team for this product. The client chose to outsource the QA to Calsoft Labs for the following reasons:

  • To improve the quality
  • To streamline operations
  • To reduce costs
  • To stick to release schedules

There were various challenges associated with project, the key ones being:

  • Setting up the offshore lab infrastructure
  • Training for the offshore team in a timely manner
  • Transition of the project from a 3rd party vendor from another country to Calsoft Labs team
  • Managing the project during the transition phase and take responsibility of delivery from both Calsoft Labs and 3rd party during the transition
  • Transitioning existing automation scripts and knowledge from the current vendor to Calsoft Labs and continue further automation script development
Team,
" Kudos to you all! You have worked extremely hard to make this happen, and I greatly appreciate the efforts of each of you. I have seen you all pull together and work like a team that has been together for years. It just goes to show what we can accomplish when we are all on one accord working towards a common goal. Please take a minute or two and congratulate each other for a job well done! "
Client QA Manager

Solution

Calsoft Labs team structure was setup to work closely with the client management team to ensure seamless delivery. Apart from the client engagement managers’ onsite and offshore, the team included onsite and offshore project leads as well as manual and automation test engineers and developers offshore.

The transition of the project from the existing teams was completed within 6 months, when Calsoft Labs made its first fully managed product release. The Calsoft Labs project team was responsible for one major release and six maintenance releases per year. Major release runs for around 6-7 months where new features need to be feature, integration and system tested. Maintenance releases include the testing of the customer fixes and regression. For each release, the team performs about 50-75 upgrades on various platforms and streams to make sure that there is no failure during upgrade. There were more than 1000 automated test cases

The project team has hands on experience in security, dynamic routing, L2 switching, VPN, static/dynamic (RIP/OSPF) routing, multicast routing (DVMRP, PIM-SM), TCL/TK scripting, WinRunner™ scripting, packet generation using IXIA® and hands on experience in using Spirant®’s Avalanche® traffic generation tool. Team members have worked on Zebra® and Cisco® routers as well. The onsite engineers took care of stress testing, patch releases, customer CR reproduction, project planning and release activities.

Results

Calsoft Labs team has made around four releases since it took full responsibility of QA at the time of writing this report. All releases were made on a committed time to the full satisfaction of the client.

Team,
" I want to express my gratitude to the entire team at their diligence and persistence in getting this release out to our customers. It's your teamwork that shows again and again the pride you have in the product and commitment to the field. Thanks! "
Client QA Director

The client has been extremely happy with the way the project transition and execution was carried out by Calsoft Labs. The ongoing project management and execution has exceeded client’s expectation and the quality of product released has made their customers happy as well

Overall, the client was able to streamline the development and QA of this product line and reduced its overall cost of QA while improving the quality of product and getting back on track with release schedules.