Outsourcing of software development for electron microscope management

FEI Company is a leading supranational corporation with a 60-year history in the area of the development and production of electron microscopes and other tools for nanotechnology applications in many science and industry sectors, including e.g. the research of new materials, life sciences, the semiconductor industry, data storage, mining industry and others.

FEI Company has top quality development centres in America, Europe and Asia, roughly 1,800 employees and sales and servicing organisations in over 50 countries around the world.

FEI Czech Republic is one of the two European development centres, focusing primarily on the research and development of the technologies for Scanning and DualBeam microscopes.

The lack of programming capacities in the region forced the FEI Czech Republic development centre in Brno to seek a reliable and erudite partner for the development of narrowly specialised software through outsourcing.
www.fei.com

FEI Company's requirements

• exceptionally high expertise and flexibility of programmers
• complex handling of the specific issues of SW development for electron microscope management
• acceptance of intra-company corporate orders, regulations and directives (Coding Guidelines)
• innovativeness of the supplied solutions, development independence, new quality of supplied solutions and designs for the improvement of existing SW
• long-term usage of the services from Edhouse’s development team
• usage of Microsoft technologies: C ++, COM/DCOM, MFC, ATL, .Net C#, WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, Embedded Platform, RTOS (Real Time Operating system)
• usage of the MS VisualStudio, Version control system - Rational ClearCase, Issue Tracking – Redmine development tools 

Edhouse

Edhouse provides a team of 10 developers (nearshore software development) who are a part of the European development centre of FEI Czech Republic. The team develops firmware components, software platforms for microscopes, user interfaces, test development, development tools and installers.

Edhouse's solution

Edhouse has carried out a detailed analysis of FEI Company’s requirements - FEI Company placed strong accent on support for innovative solutions within software development – and allocated the required programming capacities. The developers underwent training for the narrowly specialised nanotechnologies software development, as well as training on the communication with a supranational company and compliance with corporate principles. Legislative framework for long-term cooperation within offshore outsourcing was created.

The Edhouse team has become an integral part of FEI Company’s development team – it develops on virtual PCs allocated by FEI and the software is being taken over directly by the FEI team and integrated into the corporate solution. The Redmine issue tracking system (project and issue management and monitoring system) is used for the handling of new requirements and project status updates.

The Edhouse team works also on autonomous projects – FEI supplies the solution specification and Edhouse supplies the completed and tested software.

All projects are tested and quality assurance is accentuated so that the software might be tested on real microscope hardware immediately.

The mutual communication is managed by the senior project managers who check the projects’ statuses continually. The aim of weekly reports and tele-conferences is to review priority changes of individual projects, the latest status and to check the fulfilment of tasks. Technical solution team meetings are held biweekly in Edhouse and in Brno.

The Edhouse – FEI cooperation has been underway for several years. It is beneficial for both sides and highly appreciated by FEI. 

Customer's statement

“Edhouse provides us with top-quality and highly qualified professionals who have excellent command of the technological platform as well as very narrowly specialised know-how related to the execution of the tasks. Edhouse’s programmers are managed directly by our development department and the mutual cooperation is on an excellent level. Supplies on the schedule and in top quality are a standard for Edhouse.“

RNDr. Jaroslav Chmelík,CSc., head of R&D department, FEI Czech Republic s.r.o.