Readify helps Mater speed up development time

Mater Health Services (Mater) is a not-for-profit provider of health services, which operates seven hospitals, a medical research institute, and pathology and pharmacy businesses in South East Queensland.

Mater was in the process of developing a Patient Portal website. This solution exposes an internal paper based system to the public through a web portal. Patients who would previously have to attend the hospital to fill in a registration form can now register online.

The Mater team were working to tight timeframes and were using a hybrid process for development which was not working as effectively as the team would have liked. Two months into the development, not as many features of the application had been implemented as expected. This was recognised by Mater and when Readify joined, they were asked to help define a path and strategy to help improve efficiency as well as help out with the development.

Readify helped transform Mater's development process into Scrum methodology. The agile transformation was not an instant change; gradual changes were applied to avoid confusion amongst the existing team members. The transformation started by removing the daily status updates and within two weeks structural changes were made to the source code. A product owner was assigned and the project requirements were defined into product backlog in Team Foundation Server (TFS).
Readify mentored the Mater developers on how to use TFS effectively by utilising the productivity features available such as the Scrum template, product backlog, Source Control

Management (SCM), work item and bug tracking. Readify also set up 'gated check-ins' in TFS to build integrated code and run unit tests to help the Mater developers understand how SCM and TFS work.

The process changes made on the Patient Portal website team impressed the I.T. Manager and after discussions with Readify, they adopted Scrum (and Kanban) for some of their other projects.

Readify's assistance with the development of the Patient Portal has helped the Mater Team to:

• Develop confidence in using TFS, not only as a Source Control Management Tool, but also utilising the available features such as the Scrum template, product backlog, work item and bug tracking as a result of Readify's mentoring.
• Speed up the release process. Release was an error prone, manual and time consuming process which would take around an hour to complete. With the team already using Team Build and Continuous Integration, an easier process was proposed using PowerShell script to deploy build results. PowerShell was used for continuous deployment allowing push-button deployment of the successful builds into Test and UAT and later production environments, in about one minute.
• Increase productivity by using TFS as an end-to-end ALM tool, minimising the need for several applications to perform a task.
• Minimise error and time consumption by implementing new refined processes such as push-button deployment using PowerShell scripts to replace a manual process.
• Increase team morale by providing a clear path and strategy to tackle the Patient Portal project.

Technology and Methodology
The solution was achieved using the following technologies and methodologies:
Microsoft Team Foundation Server was used for the entire ALM solution including Source Control Management, Scrum Project Template, Product Backlog, Work Item and Bug Tracking. The seamless integration with Visual Studio helped avoid switching between several applications to perform a particular task, which allowed for greater productivity.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Builds were achieved though Team Build which fits nicely with the agile development cycle and the check-ins process.

Patient Portal allows patient information to be shared and contributed to by several organisations and medical systems capturing clinical information provided by external parties compiling the data into a single view of their medical history; WCF Web Services was used to integrate these different systems.


"The key benefits of using Readify to assist with our projects are around the flexibility of their offering, the methodologies they use to meet our needs and also the skills and knowledge of their staff and their ability to transfer that knowledge to our existing development team" - Steven Parrish, Director Information Solutions at Mater Health Services.

For more information on Mater Health Services, please visit the website http://www.mater.org.au/
For more information about Readify services, call +61 3 9600 2339 or 1300 666 274 (within Australia) or visit the Web site at http://www.readify.net/

Via: WhaTech