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SSP's Developers in Australia, South Africa and the UK Work as One Virtual Team and Reduce Development Cycles by Over 40%.

"Subversion MultiSite has transformed our software development process. We can now run builds at every site immediately which means that nobody is waiting for a build to happen in a different time zone. The bottom line is that we improved build times by over 500% and reduced our development cycles by 40%."

–David Stokes, Development Manager, SSP

Background

SSP uses Subversion at three sites in Australia, South Africa and the UK. Before implementing Subversion MultiSite, a central Subversion server in Melbourne supported all locations.

SSP's Challenge

  • SSP's goal was to create one virtual team out of three separate development groups in the UK, Australia and South Africa.

  • Slow and unreliable networks between SSP's sites led each team to work on separate projects based on time zone and location. Collaboration was minimal.

  • A centralized build process meant that developers at remote sites working on extensions to SSP's core products typically had to wait five days for the core team in Melbourne to create a build with their changes before they could begin testing.

  • SSP evaluated svnsync, but found that it wasn't robust enough and wouldn't address their key requirement of being able to run builds in parallel at each location. SSP's build processes included write steps that couldn't be done against svnsync's read-only slave repositories at remote sites.

  • SSP wanted a backup and recovery solution that would eliminate the risk of extended downtime and data loss after network outages and server failures.
    SSP Global Locations image

 

 

The Solution

  • Development cycles have been reduced by over 40% because network performance and reliability are no longer issues.

  • Build times are over 500% faster at remote sites. As soon as a branch with the latest version of SSP's core product is created in Melbourne, it's available in just a few seconds everywhere else. Remote developers can commit changes to it, create a build locally and begin testing in less than a day instead of five days.

  • Subversion MultiSite enabled SSP to create one virtual team out of three separate development groups. Now, SSP can assign the best resources to work together on the same projects regardless of where they're located.

  • Subversion MultiSite's built-in hot backup and automated recovery features gave SSP the failover and recovery capability they were looking for to support their distributed environment.

The Results

  • Development cycles have been reduced by over 40%.

  • Build times for remote locations are 500% faster.

  • Downtime has been eliminated due to Subversion MultiSite's built-in hot backup and automated recovery features.

  • Administrative overhead has been reduced by more
    than 50%.

  • SSP's development organization is now 24-by-7.

About SSP
SSP is the premier provider of software solutions to the global insurance and financial services industries with more than 45,000 users in over 50 countries. Offering more than just products, SSP has a proven track record and a commitment to delivery, giving customers peace of mind. 20 of the top 50 global insurers, 30 of the top 50 UK brokers and 4 of the top 10 UK financial advisers rely on SSP.