Since 2015, Rivers Agile has had the privilege to engage with Aires on a number of design and software development projects, but most recently the Aires team had a goal to improve overall quality throughout the organization’s technical solutions, including Quality Assurance assessments.
“We continue to choose Rivers Agile because we wanted someone we knew, someone that we’ve already interacted with and understood their quality of service”, said Anand Diraviyam, Aires Director of Product Management. He added, “in terms of QA process and procedures, things were evolving for a relatively young team and we needed help with that transition – helping the team grow, looking at the processes and suggesting refinements.”
With an initial focus on their Relonet 3.0 project, Rivers Agile assisted with implementing best Quality Assurance practices while helping Aires gain efficiencies, reduce overall cost, and improve the effectiveness of their in-house Quality Assurance efforts.
“Just being so invested in the day-to-day, we really needed someone to provide an outside perspective – in terms of development and laying out the process framework, but also remembering to look at the BIG picture, not just in Quality Assurance.”, remarked John Beighel, Aires Quality Assurance Team Lead.
For a four-month period, December of 2017 through March of 2018, the Rivers Agile Quality Assurance team was based on-site at Aires, receiving regular guidance and coordination from their Director of Quality Assurance Services, Keith Monahan. By conducting interviews and spending time understanding the current state of the software organization, a series of improvement opportunities was identified. Those issues, in six different functional areas, were detailed in the Quality Assurance Health Assessment deliverable.
When asked about the overall impact of the assessment, Vlad Kaminsky, Aires Director, Information Technology and Applications commented, “it was the positivity when working through the gaps we had and how Rivers Agile handled things that needed improvement.” He added, “Keith at Rivers Agile established a great rapport with the team – involving them in the process, confronting issues directly and suggesting changes in the RIGHT WAY so that the team was accepting of those improvements.”
The Rivers Agile team was then able to provide the more comprehensive, Quality Assurance Remediation Report deliverable, outlining suggested improvements for Aires to implement. Armed with a greater knowledge of best Quality Assurance practices and new procedures customized to their organization, Aires is now able to focus directly on delivering streamlined mobility management for the next generation of relocation.
As a final summary of the engagement, Vlad Kaminsky and Anand Diraviyam ended by saying, “Rivers Agile backed up their recommendations, not only based on their extensive knowledge, but by making specific suggestions that worked for our team and our culture – providing a truly customized solution for our specific needs. Thank you, this is exactly what we set out to do 4 months ago.”