SSP’s developers work as one virtual team and reduce development cycles by over 40%.

SSP uses Subversion at three sites in Australia, South Africa and the UK. Before implementing SVN MultiSite Plus, a central Subversion server in Melbourne supported all locations.

• SSP’s goal was to create one virtual team out of three separate development groups in the UK, Australia and South Africa.
• Slow and unreliable networks between SSP’s sites led each team to work on separate projects based on time zone and location. Collaboration was minimal.
• A centralized build process meant that developers at remote sites working on extensions to SSP’s core products typically had to wait five days for the core team in Melbourne to create a build with their changes before they could begin testing.
• SSP evaluated svnsync, but found that it wasn’t robust enough and wouldn’t address their key requirement of being able to run builds in parallel at each location. SSP’s build processes included write steps that couldn’t be done against svnsync’s read-only slave repositories at remote sites.
• SSP wanted a backup and recovery solution that would eliminate the risk of extended downtime and data loss after network outages and server failures.

• Development cycles have been reduced by over 40% because network performance and reliability are no longer issues.
• Build times are over 500% faster at remote sites. As soon as a branch with the latest version of SSP’s core product is created in Melbourne, it’s available in just a few seconds everywhere else. Remote developers can commit changes to it, create a build locally and begin testing in less than a day instead of five days.
• SVN MultiSite Plus enables SSP to create one virtual team out of three separate development groups. Now, SSP can assign the best resources to work together on the same projects regardless of where they’re located.
• SVN MultiSite Plus’s built-in hot backup and automated recovery features gives SSP the failover and recovery capability they were looking for to support their distributed environment.

• Development cycles have been reduced by over 40%.
• Build times for remote locations are 500% faster.
• Downtime has been eliminated due to SVN MultiSite Plus’s built-in hot backup and automated recovery features.
• Administrative overhead has been reduced by more than 50%.
• SSP’s development organization is now 24-by-7.

A Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) Report revealed that SVN MultiSite Plus delivered a return on investment of 357% with a payback period of less than two months. The subject of the study was a Fortune 500 company with annual revenues of over $5 billion that had deployed SVN MultiSite Plus two years earlier. Forrester’s TEI methodology measures costs and cost reduction, and weighs the enabling value of a technology in increasing the effectiveness of overall business processes.

“SVN MultiSite Plus has transformed our software development process. We can now run builds at every site immediately which means that nobody is waiting for a build to happen in a different time zone. The bottom line is that we improved build times by over 500% and reduced our development cycles by 40%.”
– David Stokes, Development Manager, SSP