Esurance Speeds Development Time and Boost Quality With Team Foundation Server

Online auto insurer Esurance has cut its development time by an estimated 20 percent through a new application life-cycle management system based on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

The company employs 90 on-shore and off-shore developers who deliver an average of 50 projects a month, ranging from an update to an existing claims application to a new mobile framework for expanded customer access.

“We suffered from a lack of integration among the different parts of our development organization,” says Deepak Srinivasan, director of systems engineering for Esurance. “We faced particular challenges linking a project’s business requirements to the various work items that were needed to meet those requirements, and then tracking project progress across the organization.”

Esurance worked with Microsoft partner Accentient, a member of the Visual Studio Team System Inner Circle program, to examine its application life-cycle management, set up a branching strategy and assess the best way to modularize its code base.

A stand-alone application that insurance buyers access online was chosen as the pilot application. It was migrated from Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 to version 3.5 and to Team Foundation Server. The pilot was also converted to a fresh baseline version, and for test purposes, Esurance restricted access to the Team Foundation Server to 24 developers in three locations. The test was successful and the application was put into production in March. Esurance currently aims to migrate all applications to Team Foundation Server by October.

The company now has more accurate reporting on project status and can make better use of on-shore and off-shore developers. Developers are managing their work items more effectively, and work items are more easily matched with the project’s business requirements, allowing the company to minimize defects and improve development quality.

Time-to-market, which is a major competitive differentiator for Esurance, is also improved.

“We’re getting our products to market an estimated 20 percent faster because of the efficiencies that we gain using Team Foundation Server,” Srinivasan said.

Srinivasan has also seen a drop in cost.

“We’ll save approximately 20 percent on development, which means that we’ll be able to deliver more products to the business with lower overhead,” he says.