Ericsson

Ericsson is a global manufacturer of mobile communication network equipment; the telecommunications industry has always been at the forefront of applying newly emerging technology solutions, and Ericsson is among the innovative players within it.

In June 2016 our company won Ericsson's tender in a close competition, within which three of our development teams – CAS Platform, CAS Access and NDDP – started working at Ericsson in July 2016. We provided an immediately deployable team of IT experts for running products under continuous development.

CAS is an internal remote access tool with which support engineers reliably and securely reach the switching points installed at telecom customers. It is a critical system: in the event of a mobile network failure or security incident, this is how engineers with the appropriate rights intervene as quickly as possible – the SLAs are strict, with recovery times in the order of half an hour.

The predecessor of CAS was a FreeBSD-based RSG from the 90s; by 2010 it had become obsolete and Ericsson decided to replace it – keeping the existing, usable elements. The Platform team's task was to build the connections (between Juniper, VMware and Linux devices; no boxed solution existed because of the complexity of connecting the networks), the Access team's task was rights management: who authorises, who may enter, temporary transfer of rights between support and the Ericsson network engineer, finely configurable authorisations behind a large database. Testing was largely automated, on both front-end and server side; the UI communicates via REST APIs.

NDDP is an internal application supporting the documentation of telecommunication base station deployment, the planning of the required hardware resources and order summary. Its main function is multi-level data collection on web and mobile clients, then synchronising the data with the company's backend systems. Besides functional development, an important part of the project is developing supplementary components for the .NET framework that are not available on the market, as well as a fast and efficient client-side framework.

One of the team's key tools is SDE (site design engineering tool), which significantly reduced delays caused by design errors through thoughtful, automated site planning. Since Ericsson achieved significant savings through the development of SDE, it decided to expand the team of experts to continue and speed up the project.

The team: 1 solution architect, 1 automated tester, 6 .NET developers – 8 people nearshore.

Following the Scrum methodology in two-week sprints; sprint changes – together with the demo – are held at the client's site, in close cooperation with the client's Product Owner. The teams develop in well-separated, partly independent areas with a high level of responsibility: their own product responsibility and delivery responsibility, with quality and timing acknowledged by the client. We take part in complex, distributed product development as a partner, with the opportunity to shape the final product.