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 Company: Ultimate Software
Company Description: A leading provider of end-to-end strategic human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions, Ultimate Software markets its award- winning UltiPro products as licensed software and as on-demand services through Intersourcing. More information on Ultimate Software can be found at www.ultimatesoftware.com or by calling 800-432-1729.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Product Development Team
Nomination Title: Ultimate Software's Agile Development Team
- Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2007 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
With the Internet so popular with businesses today, many software developers
are focused on creating the fastest, easiest to use, most functional solutions
for end users. The challenge for product development for businesses is the
complexity of the feature-sets and processes and how to deliver “everything”
over the Internet securely and rapidly.
Ultimate Software’s Agile Development Team was a key driver in the success of
Intersourcing, an Internet-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment which
now has nearly a million employees being served. In 2007, Ultimate Software’s
revenues grew from $115 million in 2006 to $152 million, growth fueled
primarily by this SaaS product.
The Agile Development Team combined three strategies – Lean Software
Development, Extreme Programming, and Scrum – to deliver the industry’s first
highly secure, high-performance human resources, payroll, and talent management
solution as SaaS for companies with 700+ employees, many with 10,000+
employees. Some Intersourcing customers are Elizabeth Arden, Major League
Baseball, Playboy Enterprises and Sony BMG Entertainment.
The Agile team uses Microsoft’s .NET framework, which includes WCF (Windows
Communication Foundation), to build applications that intercommunicate,
unifying various programming models supported by .NET 2.0 into a single, common
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
An important “first” was high-speed page delivery for a better customer
experience. Users can access paycheck details in less than 1 second even when
2500 concurrent users are accessing at the same moment. Another was Ultimate
Software being named the first HR/payroll SaaS provider with the ISO/IEC
27001:2005 Certification for security management -- very significant given the
business community’s concern for privacy and data protection. ISO/IEC 27001is a
global industry standard created by the International Organization for
Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, and the
multiple layers of security in Ultimate Software’s solution were audited in
2007 and will continue to be audited on an ongoing basis. Another first was
delivering an HR/payroll portal in both Spanish and French and including
Canadian localization, including HR compliance and payroll taxes, as SaaS.
Some of the unique mini-, or Scrum, teams (who named themselves) that drove
performance and security excellence in the product are:
• “DeltaForce” focuses on product performance, adding another “S” to the
industry standard PSR testing, making it PSSR (Performance, Stability,
Scalability and Reliability). DeltaForce’s test is 100 concurrent users all
performing the same task simultaneously for 24 or 48 hours. It must have a
99.99% success rate to pass. Their test is much stricter than typical
concurrency tests that allow for a 1-6 second user “think time” that happens in
real life. DeltaForce runs the test with no pausing for “think time.”
• “Hack Pack” is dedicated to penetration testing, trying to find
security flaws in our system and is the only team that locks their doors to
keep their methods secret and effective.
• “Acronyms” creates code for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI),
Single Sign On (SSO), and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and use
Test Driven Development (TDD), which automates code testing and dramatically
speeds the process of accurate code development.
- List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
http://www.ultimatesoftware.com/stevies-2008/index-best-product-development-
team.html
- Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:
Adam Rogers is Chief Technology Officer of Ultimate Software. He began his
career 10 years ago as a programmer working on the client/server version of
UltiPro, the company’s flagship product, and later helped architect and
engineer the inaugural version of UltiPro Web. Later, Rogers served as Vice
President of Engineering, overseeing the complete software development
lifecycle from specification and design to engineering and testing. He was
instrumental in transforming the entire development team to embrace the Scrum
development methodology, so teams could quickly move the UltiPro product to
the new Web Services SOA platform—enhancing the company’s award-winning SaaS
offering, Intersourcing.
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