ProSa - Advertising Marketing

Problem

ProSa is one of products of ProSiebenSat.1. It is intended for selling of advertising time. This product fits all companies that deal with advertising marketing (sell advertising time): either publish any content (TV/radio-stations, website-providers, publishing houses, etc.), or distribute the content (cable TV/Internet-providers, etc.). ProSa is a very large project that is being developed during several years, and consumes lots of human resources. Our customer decided to distribute project development between two teams, in-house and offshore. Our specialist extended in-house staff.

Solution

Together with ProSiebenSat.1 we tried different models of cooperation. In general, all these models can be divided into three groups:

• in-house manager - offshore team: customer is represented by a manager, who defines project requirements; our specialists fully develop the project (examples: ProPlan, OnAir);
• in-house analytical team - offshore programming team: customer performs project analysis and design; our team fulfills programming (example: ProSeco);
• in-house development team - offshore development team: customer performs general analysis and design of the project; detailed design and programming is carried out by two development teams.

We used the last model for joint development of ProSa. Great amount of communication is typical for that model. Most of communication is "horizontal" and occurs at both levels, project manages and programmers. Both teams successfully cooperate during several years. Our team takes part in development of all parts of ProSa, notably:

• Auxiliary server processes (so called batch jobs). For example, one of the first implemented jobs is Replication, which performs moving (migration) data from old system ProSedi to ProSa.
• Business logic: we implement services that are used by client to load/save data, to perform different calculations.
• Client side: we implement ProSa clients. Almost all clients are implemented with use of Swing. At the same time we have to develop our own custom controls to conform sophisticated behavior requirements.

Implementation of these tasks requires good knowledge of ProSa architecture and ProSa business processes, as well as deep insight into such technologies as JMS, JDBC, JMail and J2EE ones. We also widely use services implemented by other PSI teams (Organizer, Security, Logging, Backbone, etc.). Joint work of two teams proved its efficiency. Cooperation with us allowed stable rapid development of this complicated project without sufficient growth of in-house team.