Trigent Software - AI Development

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m QA director for Securly. We’re a web safety company, offering solutions to schools and parents.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We wanted to hire qualified and scalable resources for testing purposes.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started with a QA team of about two members of Trigent’s team who worked on a specific project. There wasn’t a technology aspect of their responsibilities; they worked on normal functions. Later, we hired more members of their team for a development project. During that project, they helped with the development of a VMS.

What is the team composition?

I worked with about three QA analysts and 3–4 people worked on the development project.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

We reviewed 3–4 vendors that came through references. We compared their processes, technologies, and services. We also assessed each vendor’s scalability, and Trigent was flexible. Cost was another factor that influenced our decision.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested around $494,000 in their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We hired the initial QA team members in August 2019 and brought the developers on board in March. That project ended in November 2020.  

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Their QA analysts executed the tasks that we handed them. We didn’t specifically measure their performance on tasks. However, we observed the way that they executed and followed tasks. Their team completed their tasks in reasonable timeframes. We would like to hire the QA teammates who worked with us from Trigent.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

There wasn’t much management required. However, their selection process was great. Trigent always gave us qualified candidates.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I was impressed by their diligence and commitment to their work. Their team completed their assigned work within the timeframe given to them. I didn’t see them slacking.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I would’ve liked to have had a more technical member of Trigent’s team to have analyzed our infrastructure and then led a consultation call during which they gave us ideas for improvements.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

For QA, I would definitely recommend them. Their knowledge and recruitment process are better than those of other vendors. Overall, their experience, management, and hiring are great.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a leading provider of integrated security systems. We provide visitor management, volunteer applications, and emergency management services, and the bulk of our clients are K-12 schools. I manage the QA team in the company. We’re responsible for testing apps before sending them out to clients.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We needed resources to make sure that we delivered with quality and speed.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Trigent Software is providing manual and automated testing. We first worked with them when we were rearchitecting our app.

What is the team composition?

We have 11 resources from Trigent Software in India, and we plan to expand the team.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

Our SVP of operations had worked with them in the past, and we started off with two resources. We looked at 2–3 providers in total.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost so far is close to $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Trigent in October or November 2014, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We track KPIs for Trigent Software’s team based on accountability, dependability, skillset, punctuality, creativity, ability to deliver on their own, ability to build a scalable process, and ability to listen and leverage data to make decisions.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a test manager in India that works with them directly. He makes sure that there are no ambiguities or roadblocks and passes information to me. I go to India almost every year to meet with the team and pass them our values and objectives. 

We’ve made Trigent part of our family, so to speak, and we’ve lost only 1–2 members over the years. With the pandemic, everyone’s working online, and their team is always accessible.

We’re using Microsoft Teams, and we have sprint demos and retrospectives with everyone on our side and theirs. We’re using Azure DevOps as a development repository. We post findings and different information on it.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to take charge and make decisions is impressive. They also embrace continuous improvement. As we’ve grown as a company, we’ve come up with new processes and ideologies. 

We’ve gone from a mom and pop shop to having over 100 employees in the US. Every time I come up with a new process, Trigent Software embraces it. They listen generously and put the team first.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We had an assessment for 2020 last week, and one of the things I brought up was that they could build a scalable process and be proactive.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Trigent Software is a great company to work with, and they deliver, but there needs to be two-way communication. The client can’t just sign a contract with them and expect miracles. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of Software Delivery for Newforma Inc. We specialize in AEC Project Implementation Management software for the architecture, construction, and engineering industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We needed to improve regression testing for releases of our enterprise software. We had 10 quality engineers on the team, and there was a lot of feature work that needed to be researched, developed, and investigated. I needed onsite expertise so that our team wouldn’t spend almost a quarter of the time doing regression testing.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Two different teams from Trigent support us. A functional regression test team manually tests our Windows-based client-server software. Their team uses TestRail and a defect tracking system. They also utilize Jira and Confluence, 2 Atlassian applications for issue tracking and document control management. Their automation engineer test team uses SoapUI and Postman but also implement and execute the GUI with TestComplete automation framework. Both teams work with Microsoft technologies.

What is the team composition?

We average around seven people on the team. I work with a test manager, a QA lead, four functional quality engineers, and two automation engineers.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

I previously worked with Trigent on a similar project while at a different company. They did an excellent job of following written test cases. Their team was also creative. They had technical expertise and automated functional test cases as needed. As a result, Trigent was the first team that I considered to tackle this challenge.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Trigent around January 2016, and it’s an ongoing relationship.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We manage 6 releases over the course of a year. The fact that we still heavily rely on them after five years is a success metric. If their team didn’t accomplish what we needed them to accomplish, we wouldn’t keep them on board.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re an integral part of my team. I send the project manager and the QA lead our release plans, and they organize test cases to fit our timeframe with our QA manager. If there’s a risk that they won’t hit a milestone, their team will put in the effort to ensure that we hit it. They’re willing to work around their personal schedules to meet their commitments.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed by Trigent’s commitment. Their turnover rate’s low. Out of the seven people who work on our account, I’ve worked with the same 4–5 people over the past four years. I’ve worked with the same test manager, QA lead, and a couple of engineers.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

Communication’s always an important factor, especially with an offshore team. We easily communicate with the test manager who speaks English well. The rest of their team’s a little quieter, which is fine. However, communication’s one of the biggest challenges when working with any offshore team.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We onboarded Trigent’s test manager and QA lead in person. They then brought that information back to their team. That’s critical for any offshore collaboration. It’s also important to keep communication lines open to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the Salesforce product owner for a global anti-human trafficking organization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We have a very large implementation going on right now. We’re designing our Salesforce instance from scratch. This has been a two-year project. We’ll have about 1,000 users on the platform.

The business challenge we had was that we needed businesses analysts and particularly testing resources on the project that would be temporary, for 9–12 months. We needed those resources quickly because we realized we were not going to expand our full-time positions to accommodate our need.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Trigent Software has become a very integral part of our Salesforce build team. Their primary function is QA, so they've written the majority of the tests for our Salesforce build and executed them as well. They participate in our sprints, write the testing scenarios, execute those testing scenarios, and send things back to development if they weren't completed correctly. About 80% of their time, they do QA. In some instances, that involves regression testing of certain things.

They are also performing a secondary role, which is training and UAT (user acceptance testing) help. Our staff members are the ones ultimately delivering training and helping execute through user acceptance of the platform; however, Trigent has helped us create the content for those, including training documentation and scenarios for users to execute. They’ve created 70–80% of that content, and then our team is able to put the final polish on it. That just saves us a bunch of time.

What is the team composition?

We work with two full-time QA team members, and then there is a project manager who gives us a couple of hours each week.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

We have a longstanding relationship of 3–4 years with Trigent. We’ve worked with them in a lot of different areas across our organization. Their Salesforce team is pretty knowledgeable, so we’ve returned to them again and again for different things, such as building a few pieces of our products in the past.

This is the first time we’ve them in this staff augmentation capacity. We’ll most likely do it again in the future, because it’s been pretty successful.

How much have you invested with them?

It’s about an $80,000 engagement.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them at the end of May 2020, and they will continue on the project until go-live, which will be around February 2020. It’ll be about a ten-month engagement end-to-end, and, depending on how much work we have to do, we may continue beyond that.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The primary benefit has been that full-time, HQ-based staff have been able to focus their attention on business readiness and engagement. They can spend a lot of time with our business partners and help them translate their needs into requirements, instead of spending their time on QA. 

I would say that my team got about 50% of their time back to reinvest in more thorough business engagement. Had we not done this, our internal team would’ve had to fulfill the role that Trigent is fulfilling. We’ve been able to put our staff on more intentional, nuanced work to prepare our business for the changes, and I think our project will be much more successful. Without Trigent’s support, we would’ve moved a lot slower, or we wouldn’t have spent time with our business partner.

We were also able to run UAT sessions simultaneous with build. That’s a little unusual; a lot of times, you build the product and then do formal UAT at the end. We were able to double up and run a more formal UAT along with our build so that we caught problems earlier. We could do that because we had supplemental staff, so our analysts could run formal sessions more readily. Overall, these time savings allowed our team to deliver a better product and also engage with our business in a change management capacity that we would not have been able to do otherwise.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve very communicative. They provide summaries each week of what’s going on. We meet with the two analysts every morning, and they’ve been very forthcoming as well as accommodating in their schedules.

We use an internal agile management tool, and they leveraged that to work with us on our product delivery. The rest of the communication is via email or meeting.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their analysts learned our product pretty quickly, and that was quite impressive because this is probably one of the most complex builds I’ve ever engaged on. Their analysts’ ability to comprehend without us giving an enormous amount of time to learn was great. We’d teach them a few things here and there as the project kicked off, but we didn’t actually sit them down and put them through any formal training to understand how our business works or how our product would work. Nonetheless, they were able to keep up with us. They’ve been able to craft this rather complicated build and ultimately provide value because they understand what’s going on.

Are there any areas they could improve?

In terms of project management, I don’t think our visibility into scheduling is very good. That has caused a few hiccups, such as not realizing people are out. To me, that was less about the analyst and probably more about their project management being more proactive in communicating holiday schedules and thinks like that. They were responsive when we complained about it. That was probably the only area where we had some hiccups.

Any advice for potential customers?

Just be really direct with communication and what you want. In the beginning, the team wanted us to be highly directive, which I think had to do with the nature of changing resources and cross-cultural relationships. 

Now that they’re incorporated in, they’re doing a better job of making their own judgment calls when they need to because we explicitly gave them freedom to do so. I’d recommend being super straightforward and very specific about what you want early on. As you work with resources, you’ll develop a more trusting relationship where they’ll feel they have more freedom to make judgments calls on your behalf.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of PG Calc. We do actuarial calculations for institutions that do planned-giving instruments.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We needed help moving an application from desktop to the web.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

For the first project, Trigent Software architected from the ground up in a multi-tenant solution. It allows us to have multiple tenants and instances. A client can be set up to have their own application, database, or server. 

We can also set multiple clients up on the same application or database. For another project, they rewrote another one of our products, migrating it to a web version. It’s a tool used with and in front of donors. It’s touch-interface and light on the communication side. 

What is the team composition?

Initially, we worked with an architect and another person, neither of whom are with the company currently. We have two people that have been the main points of contact for both projects: a project manager and a technical lead. 

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

My colleague came across them in our search, and I had worked with them previously. It was a positive experience, so we reached out to them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $2,275,000 roughly. For the past five years, we’ve had an annual spend of around $350,000, and it was approximately $175,000 per year prior to that.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together around December 2008, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They do a good job of completing tasks within a two-week target. We are satisfied overall with the quality of their work.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We have weekly scheduled meetings and daily emails. Trigent Software provides updates on testing, as well as upcoming and completed tasks. The communication started out rough but is now great. We use SmartBear to exchange documents and Bear Bugzilla for tracking bugs.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have shown excellent ability to learn new technologies throughout our quest to find solutions that meet the stringent regulations in our dealings with banks.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Communication with senior management has lessened, but it’s so efficient with the team that it’s not really a problem.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Due to their culture, they don’t like to give bad news or to say no. Ask them to tell you negatives sooner rather than later to give you time to work on it.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re an email security startup located in Cupertino, California. We focus on protecting emails for small to medium-sized businesses as well as enterprises. I’m one of the company’s founders.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

The primary reason for our engagement with Trigent was to improve the quality of our product. We wanted to be more efficient and optimize our testing processes.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Trigent validated any capability or feature that our team developed to enhance our products. Their team built automation suites to ensure that our products’ new functionalities worked as expected. If a functionality didn’t work, they created tickets and followed up with our developers to make sure the issue was resolved on time. They also helped with manually testing products. Trigent helped us with QA strategies and built a QA framework for us too.

What is the team composition?

We started working with three people from Trigent: a project manager, a senior test automation engineer, and a junior test automation engineer. Towards the end of our engagement, we worked with one senior automation engineer.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

A colleague highly recommended Trigent for building automation speeds and testing products. That’s why we engaged Trigent.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $35,000–$50,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2019, and then we stopped the engagement in April 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They have solid engineers on their team and the quality of their work was truly amazing. Trigent also listened to our feedback and fixed challenges as soon as possible. When a candidate didn’t meet our expectations, we provided them with feedback. Their team understood the feedback and then brought in another person. Trigent always put us first.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We had daily stand-up meetings. Their project manager was involved in tracking all of their team’s tasks. If a task slipped, they let us know and spent extra time to move it back on track. Their project manager was responsible and accountable.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Trigent assigned an exceptional engineer to our project. The quality of her code and attention to detail were incredible. We don’t often see those qualities in people. Trigent was also highly receptive to feedback.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s important that they find the right candidate based on the project's requirements. They could spend more time understanding their client’s expectations. Our initial use case wasn’t smooth and it took us a couple of months to be comfortable working together.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that you work with the right set of people in Trigent. Give them proper feedback as soon as possible. Once you find the right people, the quality of their team's work will be really good.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re an employee benefits and HR consultancy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We have an outsourced arm that processes medical child support orders on behalf of employers. We wanted to improve the efficiency and accuracy of processing through automation.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Trigent initially sent a couple of team members on-site to map out the system’s requirements, which took about three weeks because it’s a fairly complex business. Then, they started to deliver using an agile approach. Their team gave us an entire proprietary platform to process orders through automation. They built features to prevent mistakes during processing.

Last year, they put frontend automation into the platform. They continue to fix bugs and enhance the product.

What is the team composition?

We had about 4–5 primary contacts including a project manager and an architect.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

We hired someone in the IT space to manage the RFP process, and that’s how we found Trigent. Their team laid out how they would tackle this project through sprints. As this was back in 2014, that wasn’t as prevalent. We liked their approach and their team, which seemed to know their technology. Trigent appeared to be a good fit.

How much have you invested with them?

The original platform cost about $250,000, and we spend around $36,000 a year for ongoing enhancements.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the project in 2014, and our relationship’s ongoing. We have a monthly maintenance agreement with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We developed the first platform designed specifically for processing medical child support orders. Most companies in this business take an existing benefits administration platform and "jury-rig" it to make it work for the processing of medical child support orders, but Trigent helped us build a proprietary system designed specifically for the purpose of processing medical child support orders.

Our productivity soared because we built functionality into the platform that automates calculations and other parts of the process that were labor intense. We set out to enhance process accuracy and efficiency and we have accomplished both. Now, we process more orders with fewer people more accurately than ever before.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We have the same primary contact as we had in 2014. It helps that they retain people. For example, the main architect from our original project still works on the platform today. That continuity’s helpful because it’s a complex system.

Trigent uses Basecamp to oversee projects. Their team manages timelines and holds us accountable. We’re happy with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their team makes us think harder about what we really need. In the end, our requirements are significantly clearer than we initially present to them. When we deploy features, we don’t have many hiccups. Their team knows how to challenge us and think through what the platform needs to do. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

As they’re overseas, we use technology to communicate. It can be difficult to totally understand each other. That’s why putting everything in writing’s helpful.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure to read everything that Trigent sends, especially during the requirements session. Make sure that everything’s captured in the documents. After a while, we had a tendency to assume that their team captured our ideas because they’re capable. If you don’t notice that a functionality’s missing, you’ll pay for it in the backend.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a collection of international companies in the US, Australia, Mexico, Spain, and South Africa. We deliver work opportunities for J-1 Visa sponsored participants across the world.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

We had an antiquated platform that ran in Rackspace. We needed to take that environment out of Rackspace. This was especially pressing because the Windows servers that supported it was going out of maintenance. We wanted to hang onto the data in the application for at least three more years, so we worked with Trigent to migrate it into the Azure Cloud.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Over the last eight years, Trigent maintained and developed the application. We recognized that we needed to keep the application operational because it holds historical data. As a result, we worked with Trigent to develop the scope of work to migrate the application onto Azure. They were instrumental in planning and completing the migration.

What is the team composition?

I worked with 3–4 people in total. The team included a couple of developers, a project manager, and an account manager.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

The partnership preceded my relationship with the company. Their team was a long-term partner of the company, and I inherited the relationship. It made sense to continue the relationship because they had legacy knowledge and understood our goals.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $10,000–$50,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We kicked off the project in November 2019 and it was completed in March 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

The application continues to be operational, and that’s the measurement of success. Since they completed the migration, I haven’t had an issue with the application. Their team didn’t miss a beat, and the platform continues to operate as expected.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We mostly communicated via email and jumped on a Skype call when necessary. Their project management was top notch. They presented the migration plan and provided consistent updates. Their team met deadlines and completed the work as expected. The project unfolded without any issues.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their professionalism was definitely their most impressive quality. Their developer was phenomenal and trained another developer to familiarize them with our environment. He did a great job with that process. I’m overall impressed by their level of planning and the quality of their work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they did a great job. Overall, we were happy.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give them an opportunity. Their work’s strong. Their professionalism and expertise are worth consideration.   

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of client success for a Microsoft consultancy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Trigent Software?

As a small company, we needed a capable partner that could help us deal with variations in business. We wanted to augment our own staff with technical resources from an outside party. The price benefit of an offshore partner also played a role in our decision.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Trigent helps us with our client engagements, which last anywhere from a couple of months to over a year. Their team supports two types of projects: transformation and innovation. During transformation projects, they migrate information from one platform to another or modernize an application in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Innovation projects involve different services such as app and software development.

Their team often provides us with SharePoint services. They support operation and configuration as well as develop applications on the platform, which may involve C#, Javascript, and PowerShell script.

What is the team composition?

Over the course of our partnership, the team size varied between 1–5 people.

How did you come to work with Trigent Software?

Our company’s executive leadership realized that we had to have this capability to be competitive. They looked at multiple companies and decided to partner with Trigent. We’re happy with them.

How much have you invested with them?

On average, we probably spend between $80,000–$150,000 a year on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started around the second quarter of 2011, and our partnership’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Their team consistently hits sprint targets. Our teams also develop similar code quality, so we have about the same defect rates.

We measure net promoter scores on our projects too. We always have high scores—above 90%. That’s fairly rare in terms of customer satisfaction. Trigent plays a role in that.

How did Trigent Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We’re primarily a Scrum development shop and use metrics to hit targets for sprints. Our managers direct the projects and work directly with Trigent’s technical people. However, their engagement manager’s always willing to help.

Their team adheres to our process approach and strictly follows it. Internally, we don’t give a second thought to involving their team in a project. They’re an integrated part of our team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Given the longevity of our partnership, it’s clear that Trigent takes good care of their relationships with their customers. They have a lot of empathy and adopt our problems.

Their team goes above and beyond to be flexible with our changeable resource requirements. Projects come and projects go, which means our staff levels change. I had painful experiences with previous vendors trying to scale up and down. Trigent’s flexible, so we’re able to work through that scaling process.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be helpful to have an annual refresher on their capabilities. That would allow us to keep them top of mind when we have new opportunities.  

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If Trigent appoints a tech lead, focus on building a relationship with them. They’re your eyes and ears offshore. The better their team understands your business and its needs, the smoother the scaling process will be.