About

With the headquarters in Europe and offices in the USA, Japan and Korea, the Client is a global leader in image processing with an extensive portfolio of innovative technologies and patents. The company offers award-winning products and solutions to enhance user experience in all aspects of digital imaging, including processing, compression, storage, printing, and display of digital images. The Client s patented intellectual property spans

Challenge

In 2011, the Client aimed to create new functionality for one of their products – a standalone application to help users revamp photos by applying analog and vintage effects. After a series of failed outsourcing projects with Eastern European vendors, the Client was still in need of a reliable development team ready to start right away. VolgoTechnologies reached out to the company to offer its 22 years of experience in cross-domain software development. The main challenge was to turn the outsourcing-averse Client into a long-term partner (76% of VolgoTechnologies revenue comes from the clients we have been serving for more than 1 year).

Solution

To cut the development costs by 40%, VolgoTechnologies suggested using the Qt framework to make the application run on both Windows and Mac by the effort of one team instead of two. Upon signing a strict NDA to protect the Client s intellectual property, VolgoTechnologies assigned 4 Qt Developers, 3 Testers, and 1 Scrum Master to work under a T&M arrangement with only the Product Manager on the Client s side. The team provided a careful planning and architecture design and made some proposals to reduce the development costs and improve the product features. Though initially designed as a plugin, the product evolved into a standalone application that could be easily integrated with other image processing software like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and more.

Despite the sales boost after the product release, the project revealed several inconsistencies in both companies attitudes towards cooperation. For security reasons, the Client was reluctant to share their infrastructure (for example, time tracking and revision control systems) with third parties. Simultaneously, VolgoTechnologies needed some time to adjust their development processes to the Client s understanding of Scrum and be able to deliver a potentially shippable product at the end of a sprint. However, inspired by the product s progress in the market (70,000 unique users) the companies went on to learn from each other and, thus, invest in mutual success.

Whereas the development team, increased in size, headed for the next, improved version of the software, a number of small projects followed. VolgoTechnologies created a tool – an application and a plugin – that allows correcting complex perspective problems, deformed objects and various types of distortions. In addition to that, a team of 2 Testers was commissioned to perform quality assurance for a desktop software to optimize camera by eliminating noise and reveal important details and textures taking the most out of an image.

Staging

Data Ware House

Data Ware House

Desktop Application

Results

The Client has paved their way to business growth worldwide thanks to the flexibility and short time-to-market (3-4 months per product) they achieved while ramping up development capabilities together with VolgoTechnologies. In 4.5 years, the cooperation between the companies has grown from one team of 8 specialists to 7 teams totaling more than 30 people.

Technologies and Tools

Qt, C++, Objective-C, iOS, Xcode, Cocoa, .NET, WPF, C#, Visual Build, InstallShield, PackageMaker, Intel IPP library, RLM Activation, Calabash.