Microsoft Visual StudioCustomer Solution Case Study

Cognizant Accelerates Enterprise Application Development Cycle-time by 10 Percent

OverviewCountry or Region: IndiaIndustry: IT Consulting and Technology Services/Outsourcing Services

Customer ProfileCognizant Technology Solutions is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business outsourcing services. Based in Teaneck, New Jersey, the company has more than 50 global delivery centers and more than 63000 employees servicing over 500 clients.

Business SituationTo support the company’s rapid growth and business needs, Cognizant required a more sophisticated IT architecture. It needed to streamline its development process and boost its developers’ productivity.

SolutionCognizant deployed Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, helping developers to work together effectively.

Benefits Enhances communication and

collaboration Accelerates cycle-time by 10

“With all the information at our fingertips, we’ve witnessed cycle-time improvements of around 10 percent. This enables us to keep up with the needs of our business. Additionally, we are able to solve our customer’s business problems faster and with less effort.”

Cognizant, a leading provider of IT, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, was outgrowing its existing IT infrastructure. Cognizant’s consistent track record of being the fastest growing company amongst the tier 1 IT services players is a result of its consistency in adopting best-in-class technology and tools to deliver greater value to its customers. In its constant endeavour to make the development processes much quicker and more efficient, Cognizant built a customized Application Lifecycle Management solution, called SPECTA, on Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 and Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. Armed with this comprehensive solution that addressed every facet of the development lifecycle, Cognizant’s army of Microsoft technology professionals have been able to increase productivity, better manage the application lifecycle,

SituationCognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of application technology, business consulting, IT infrastructure and business process outsourcing services to its customers. It was founded in 1994 as an IT development and maintenance services arm of The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation. The company was spun-off as an independent organization two years later. Since 1996, Cognizant has worked closely with large organizations to help them build stronger, more efficient, and more agile businesses. Cognizant was listed on the NASDAQ in 1998, and is a member of the NASDAQ-100 Index and S&P 500 Index. It is also a Forbes Global 2000 company and a member of the Fortune 1000 and is ranked among the top information technology companies in Business Week’s Hot Growth and Top 50 Performers listings.

Cognizant is widely recognized by leading analyst firms including Gartner and Forrester as a Global Tier 1 supplier. The company is rated high by analysts and customers for its customer intimacy and industry domain knowledge.

Cognizant has been a pioneer in using agile development methodologies effectively across distributed teams. In the past, Cognizant used a mix of tools to support the development process, including Visual Studio Professional 2005 for development, Microsoft Visual Source Safe for source code control, and other open-source and home-grown tools for managing business requirements, tasks, changes and defects. The mixed tool set, however, did little to support and streamline adherence to agile development principles. Instead, it hampered team output, consumed additional time and impeded communication. Specific problem areas included: offline traceability of artifacts, frequent transitions between multiple tools used for design, testing, reviews and task tracking, and excessive time spent on creating reports.

“Our company was experiencing continued and significant growth. To keep pace, it was important for us to increase the productivity of our employees with optimized business solutions,” explains Rajashree Natarajan, Asst Vice President, Process and Tools Group, Cognizant. “We needed a comprehensive,

“Cognizant’s SPECTA built on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System provides an integrated, optimal delivery environment that increases productivity, for all roles, by eliminating or reducing switches between multiple applications, tools and activities.”

Key Parts of Visual Studio Team System used by CognizantMicrosoft Visual Studio

Team System 2008 Team Suite

Provides the ultimate set of tools for every team discipline

engaged in the project: architecture, design, development,

database and testingMicrosoft Visual Studio

TeamSystem 2008

Development Edition

Provides developers with an advanced set of tools to

identify inefficient, insecure or poor-quality code, specify

coding best practices and automate software unit testing

Microsoft Visual Studio Team

System 2008 Database Edition

Provides advanced tools for database change management

and testing and offers functionality to enable database

developers and administrators to be more productive

Microsoft Visual Studio Team

Focuses on improving the design and validation of distributed systems

enterprise-class solution for managing all aspects of the development process and we were eager to find a solution.”

Cognizant anticipated the need to streamline the company’s development process and build a more integrated and extensible system architecture to keep pace with the company’s growth rate. The company aimed to strengthen its entire IT infrastructure with the ultimate goal of boosting productivity and accelerating cycle-time.

SolutionTo optimize its Microsoft solution development environment, Cognizant implemented a comprehensive ALM solution based on Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System, which extends the Visual Studio integrated development experience from the individual developer to the entire development team by delivering powerful new role-based tools for all development-related users, along with a centralized repository for project data.

Cognizant’s ALM solution called “SPECTA” is built on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. It provides multi-disciplined teams with an integrated toolset for requirements management, task management, defect management, change management, build management, version management, architecture, design, development,

database development and testing of applications. Team members can continuously collaborate and utilize a complete set of tools and guidance at every step of the application life cycle.

“The integration between the integrated development environment (IDE), source control, build tools, team portal and work-items like features, tasks, bugs and changes and the easy extensibility points provided by Team Foundation Server were the key deciding factors for the solution,” comments Sai Krupa Sagar, Chief Architect, Cognizant. “The new technology contained many significant features that helped us optimize our development process using the extensible ALM platform.”

Architecture Overview Architecture: Team Foundation

Server Integration with

SPECTA comprises of a customized TFS process template and a set of extensions as illustrated in the figure. The TFS process template supports the best practices of Feature-driven Development (FDD) and Scrum agile methodologies. The extensions included new work-items, reports, check-in policies and plug-ins that support standard engineering practices like Build Verification Tests, Continuous Integration and Contextual Guidance. It also includes a synchronization engine that integrates with Cognizant’s Intelligent Delivery Ecosystem – Cognizant 2.0. The ecosystem is an enterprise-wide collaborative platform for workflow automation, process orchestration, and seamless knowledge management. One of the widely used SPECTA plug-ins provides integration between Microsoft Outlook and Team Foundation Server.

Project planning and initial setup is enabled through the advanced framework provided by Cognizant 2.0. When this information is synched with SPECTA, an equivalent team project is created on Team Foundation Server and work-items are automatically populated. Thereafter, developers use Visual Studio Team System to perform all their tasks including using the Team Portal, Build, and Version Control.

The Project Manager uses the multi-dimensional reports provided by Team Foundation Server to track status and manage risks. The synch-engine periodically synchs up work-item data between Team Foundation Server and Cognizant 2.0. This enables different stakeholders to access the advanced planning, reporting and knowledge management capabilities of Cognizant 2.0 while the development and testing teams access the integrated toolset and engineering capabilities provided by SPECTA extensions on Team Foundation Server. Several Visual Studio plug-ins make data entry easier and intuitive.

Business Analysts can create and manage requirements through the familiar interface of Microsoft Outlook 2007. Project Managers can manage work-items through multiple channels using Microsoft Outlook 2007 or through Microsoft Project or Microsoft Excel or through a browser interface. Additionally, stakeholders can view multi-dimensional reports

instantaneously through a Silverlight powered dashboard.

Custom workflows are implemented to automate the usually offline processes of reviews, change, test and defect management. Building all this on enterprise-class server products like Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Microsoft SQL Server helped Cognizant to deploy the solution faster.

“Team Foundation Server gave us the flexibility to customize work item types and other project artifacts to support our own way of working,” explains Sai Krupa Sagar. “It integrates all aspects of software development—item tracking, version control, builds, and reporting—into a single collaboration environment.”

Implementation OverviewThe initial version of the solution was a result of Cognizant’s early involvement in the adoption program of Team Foundation Server 2005 even before its commercial availability. Since then, there have been five major releases of SPECTA, each with new, additional features and customizations to address several customer requirements. Actually, the agile process promoted by SPECTA, was followed to build the SPECTA

solution using distributed teams. The actual implementation involved modifying XML files, writing custom code in .NET, building reports in SQL Server Reporting Services and customizing the SharePoint portal.

“The adaptable architecture of Team Foundation Server and the generous extensibility mechanisms provided by the architecture helped us extend and customize TFS behavior with minimum effort and shorter cycle time,” adds Sai Krupa Sagar.

BenefitsWith the new solution, Cognizant has improved its ability to successfully follow agile methodologies even in a distributed delivery model. Development groups are now more productive; and communication and collaboration are stronger, and the agile methods accommodate change more efficiently. All this has increased customer satisfaction and is becoming a strong competitive advantage for Cognizant. Several of Cognizant’s customers are using variants of the SPECTA solution within their enterprises. Cognizant has helped build custom extensions and reports as needed.

“Cognizant’s SPECTA built on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System provides an integrated, optimal delivery environment that increases productivity, for all roles, by eliminating or reducing switches between multiple applications, tools

Fast Facts

Size of the Software Development

Team for VSTS Implementation

1 architect3 developers2 testers

Duration 1 release every 6 monthsDeveloper Tools Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server

Microsoft Office 2007 Tools

and activities,” says Rajashree Natarajan.

Enhances Communication and Collaboration By implementing SPECTA with Visual Studio Team System on Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server, Cognizant has a tightly integrated environment along with the tools required to facilitate a more collaborative development process.A central repository for all project data helps improve team collaboration by keeping everyone informed of the project status. Adopting Microsoft Visual Studio Team System has allowed the development team to significantly improve its ability to collaborate between geographies and time zones. Real time integration with Cognizant 2.0 vastly increased the collaboration quotient by fusing Visual Studio based developer environment into the enterprise wide collaboration platform of Cognizant 2.0. Together, this integrated environment enables seamless communication between developers, testers and other stakeholders enabling all project members to work in concert toward a common goal.

Accelerates Cycle-time by 10 PercentThe new solution provides multiple areas and opportunities for collaboration among the development team. Features such as, a shared team portal, integrated change management, and a common data repository boost collaboration among

developers, consequently cutting the time and cost of application lifecycle management and putting applications into production more quickly and cost-effectively. The availability of information across the application lifecycle has created a more unified work environment.

“With all the information at our fingertip and the integrated environment we are seeing cycle-time improvements of around 10 percent,” says Rajashree Natarajan. “This enables us to keep up with the needs of our business. Additionally, we are able to solve our customer’s business problems faster and with less effort.”

The company’s software projects involve many individuals with different roles and responsibilities at various stages of the development cycle. To aid in the distribution of work, the SPECTA process includes a series of out-of-the-box roles, such as business analyst, architect, developer, tester, scrum master, feature owner and project manager, and a set of tools and practices specific to each role. The SPECTA extensions on Team Foundation Server, monitors and integrates these roles.

“The less number of switches we have, between different tools and applications, the less room there is for errors and shorter the time required to complete most activities,” states Sai Krupa Sagar.  Reduces Cost of Software Quality

Software quality has improved because the new development environment helps team members to detect potential errors earlier in the project life cycle. The customized methodology imbedded into Team Foundation Server guarantees quality throughout the software development lifecycle and ensures that all steps in the workflow are followed and completed correctly.

The team-oriented features of Visual Studio Team System help the team to ensure that defects are not introduced while developing. Centralized source code repository helps the team to maintain a daily build and ensure code quality and tested software.

“With SPECTA on Visual Studio Team System, we’ve been able to increase the quality of our development process and enable more control and transparency,” says Kishore Kumar, Delivery Director, Cognizant who has overseen the use of SPECTA, VSTS and TFS solution on a large globally distributed project for a Life Sciences customer.

Improves Process Integration and ManagementThe SPECTA solution built on Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server has helped Cognizant to better manage every aspect of development and production processes, including requirements, source code, build schedules, task tracking, bug tracking and change management. Integrated

process workflows, version control, work-item tracking, and other features in Team Foundation Server provide the transparency necessary to improve control of code, project artifacts, and processes. Managers have greater visibility into the true state of the project, helping them to make better decisions, align with best practices, and help developers generate higher-quality code.

“The multi-dimensional reports provided by Team Foundation Server and the ability to export the reports and analyze them using Microsoft Excel has helped immensely in tracking the status and managing project risks,” says Gaurav Varshney, Senior Project Manager, Cognizant who lead the management of the project for a Life Sciences customer. “Along with a consistent development process, we now have real-time visibility into key performance and quality metrics,” adds Gaurav.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world's most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced with Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft Expression® Suite. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Cognizant Technology Solutions services, visit the Web site at: www.cognizant.com

Software and Services Developer Tools

− Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008

− Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2009