Ultimate Dream Team was launched in 2007 as a start up project. After the site’s successful [...]]]> Ultimate Dream Teams, a fantasy sporting site, has over 35 000 users playing online football for the World Cup – a feat that GuruHut, their software developers, are very proud that they have had nothing to do with.

Ultimate Dream Team was launched in 2007 as a start up project. After the site’s successful launch, the system that had been developed was struggling with capacity and site stability. Unable to cope with the load Ultimate Dream Teams called in GuruHut to redevelop the system and allow the site to scale in user numbers.

The successful reprogramming and launch under their belts, GuruHut and Ultimate Dream Teams started to discuss how to continue the relationship. One of GuruHut’s ethical maxims is that they get in, deliver the job and get out; they don’t attempt to insinuate themselves permanently into their clients’ businesses.

This tied in with what Ultimate Dream Teams wanted, because they were hoping to carry out the site maintenance themselves. So GuruHut handed over the day to day operation and maintenance of the solution , while providing all the support necessary for Ultimate Dream Teams to run with it.

“They very much lived up to their initial defined process, and then supported us in having a team that does things themselves,” says site co-founder , Kevin Meltzer. “They have stayed close to us, though, and when required they help us with technical direction or consulting. They are like a sounding board for us, when not engaged in direct development. This is a role that they play very well – helping us to understand what we need to do to complete work.”

As strange as it may seem for GuruHut to cite Ultimate Dream Teams as a case study when they are so uninvolved, they use this relationship as an example of how they practice what they preach. The solution was delivered, and then they supported Ultimate Dream Teams in handling it themselves.

“One of our intentions was to enable them to stand on their own two feet, and they’ve been doing that for quite some time,” says Grant Finnemore, owner and director of GuruHut. “What we’ve found is that after the initial work that we did getting the games up and running, we were able to hand over, and they can deal with each individual game that comes along.”

This year, of course, there has been a huge amount of activity around the World Cup, but that didn’t mean a whole lot of development work for the site. “The World Cup is just another competition, from a programming perspective,” says Meltzer.

For the World Cup, Ultimate Dream Teams is running two games – one for SuperSport with over 29 000 users and the other for MTN with over 6 500, meaning that the system is comfortably accommodating 35 000 players without needing any further development or assistance.

Of course, once the relationship had been developed, underpinned by ethics, integrity and the delivery of a solid, working system, GuruHut were the go-to guys when any high-level development was needed. Now that Meltzer is planning an upgrade to Ultimate Dream Teams 2.0, they’ll be bringing GuruHut back in to take their site to the next level.

“We’re looking at the upliftment of our platform to version 2,” says Meltzer. “So far we’ve been working with the same version and made incremental improvements. Now, with the way that the world is moving with social networking, we need a new approach to incorporate these elements.”

Users will now be able to make personal comments in their statuses, so that they can say “watching the final” or “my team’s going to win”. There will also be feature improvements that make it easier for people to play the game – small things that Meltzer says will be wrapped up into a much larger build. “Obviously we’ll be engaging far more actively with Grant and GuruHut for that,” says Meltzer.

JIRA, developed by software house Atlassian, is used for issue tracking and project management by over 11 500 organisations in more than 107 countries around the [...]]]> GuruHut has announced the release of Atlassian’s JIRA 4, a widely used issue and bug tracker for software development and project management, with nearly 1 000 features and improvements.

JIRA, developed by software house Atlassian, is used for issue tracking and project management by over 11 500 organisations in more than 107 countries around the world, with customers like BMW, Yahoo, Adobe, Disney and the Apache Foundation endorsing the product with their ongoing custom.

Locally distributed by software development house GuruHut, who now have the in-house expertise to implement and support the product, the latest version features OpenSocial gadgets and social networking capabilities to create a truly interactive and customisable working environment for users.

“The upgrade of JIRA 4 extends the issue-tracking capabilities of previous versions throughout the enterprise,” says Len Weincier, a director and software architect at GuruHut. “It’s embracing the social networking capabilities of the product – that’s social networking in a business sense – and is the first commercial business application to do that successfully.”

JIRA 4 incorporates a range of new features, all architected to help organsiations collaborate better. It features new-look and easily customisable dashboards that ship with dozens of pre-built gadgets, as well as supporting gadgets from other Atlassian products like Bamboo, FishEye and Confluence.

It makes use of JIRA Query Language (JQL) to enable users to trace elusive issues within the system. Its interface has been refreshed, simplifying access to key functions. New Facebook-like activity streams display the latest activity for JIRA issues, projects and people, that can be displayed on the dashboard or added to any RSS reader.

A new pricing model has made JIRA more accessible to smaller teams and companies. For US$1 200, companies can buy 25 user licenses.

JIRA also boasts a broad collection of agile project management capabilities, courtesy of GreenHopper 4, which allows users to track progress and assists with future estimates.

GuruHut is in the process of finalising an upgrade implementation of JIRA 4 at one of their clients, VOX, and are confident that the new features and capabilities will radically improve the issue tracking and project management at the site.

“We’re confident in the capabilities of JIRA 4 because we use it, and other Atlassian products, in our own software development,” says Weincier.

“Our primary focus as a small company has been to find and retain good people, irrespective of their background,” says Grant [...]]]> GuruHut has achieved a BBB Empowerdex rating for 2009, an improvement on their previous year’s rating of B, and achieved, they say purely by focusing on finding the right talent for the jobs available.

“Our primary focus as a small company has been to find and retain good people, irrespective of their background,” says Grant Finnemore, CEO of GuruHut. “By doing just that, when we first embraced the scorecard process last year, we had already achieved a rating of B. Using the same hiring philosophies ahead of our second rating, we’re delighted to have achieved a BBB.”

A BBB Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) rating means that companies who spend their money on GuruHut’s services are able to count 80% of that expenditure in the Procurement category of their own scorecards.

“Most companies focus on equity levels as the core of their empowerment activities, but often neglect to acknowledge other parts of the scorecard,” says Finnemore. “Instead, we focus on achieving consistently high scores across all categories, embracing the widest possible view of empowerment.”

GuruHut looks beyond ownership, believing that previously disadvantaged staff within the organisation should also have the power to influence the day-to-day running of the business.

Although it is difficult to influence the activities of some of their suppliers for a score in the Procurement category, GuruHut has increased its focus on socio-economic development, contributing to various charitable organisations every year.

“We are constantly exploring new ways to actively play the role of good citizens,” says Finnemore.

A heck of a lot more.

But, instead of being exhilarated, the Meltzers were worried. What had started out as [...]]]> It was the week before the Cricket World Cup in February 2007. Kevin and Craig Meltzer’s newly launched fantasy leagues gaming website, Ultimate Dream Teams, was receiving a lot more hits than they had anticipated.

A heck of a lot more.

But, instead of being exhilarated, the Meltzers were worried. What had started out as a passion project with the input of various friends and associates who were likewise sports fans had taken on a life of its own.

The brothers weren’t sure that the underlying technology was up to the task of processing these kinds of volumes. “We were taken aback by the uptake and interest in playing these games,” says Kevin Meltzer. “The Dream Teams platform had been developed by a team as a hobby project, but they didn’t have the focus on high volume websites that was required.”

Calling in the gurus

As the system’s instability became more and more apparent, Kevin and Craig realised that they had to do something fast, or risk the whole project coming apart at the seams.

Craig had heard of a Java solutions company, GuruHut, with a good name in the industry, and had been hoping for an opportunity to work with them through his other company, Consology.

“We were already looking for ways that we could work together, because they have a great reputation in the market,” Craig Meltzer says. “The site provided us with the opportunity to do so.”

So they approached GuruHut with an impossible task on a ridiculous deadline – and an even tighter deadline to make their minds up about whether to take the job.

“We hadn’t really done anything like that before in an online gaming space, so we were concerned about whether we’d have the time and energy to get it running within the very tight deadline,” says Grant Finnemore, Technical Director of GuruHut. Ultimately, the allure of a new challenge proved too great for GuruHut to resist, and they agreed to throw their resources into getting the system up and running in time for the first over.

“We knew we had their full support, and we weren’t hamstrung by having to deal with decisions that had been made in the past,” says Finnemore.

“They were very good clients, who had the faith that we were doing right by them, and provided whatever we needed to get the site up and running.”They set two programmers on the job, working 16 hours a day in the three days before the start of the World Cup.

The pressure mounted with every hour that passed, but at the same time, the work wasn’t that difficult for the GuruHut programmers. The process was made easier by the fact that most of the code had already been written – but needed tidying up.

“We examined the technical choices that had been made and the code used and found that they fell short of what we would consider to be best practice,” says Finnemore. “So we moved lots of the choices out of the system and replaced them with more compelling ones.”

Cuts and choices

In the time leading up to the World Cup, and in the two weeks after the launch of the site, they were able to reduce the complexity of the system considerably, paring the lines of code down from over 20 000 lines to around 7 500 with no reduction in functionality.

“The underlying technology was the same as would be used in many other applications, and wasn’t actually specific to gaming,” says Finnemore. “We made a few choices like the use of Flash that was introduced later on in the game. It was a useful and interesting learning exercise from that point of view.” GuruHut also made a point of using open-source technologies, rather than forcing Ultimate Dream Teams to purchase expensive software.

“All the technologies we used were open source, and that strongly fits in with our internal culture of trying to find the right solution for the client, where they don’t have to pay for extensive licenses of projects,” says Finnemore.

The solution that they delivered not only made the system capable of bearing the weight of great volumes of users at the time, it future-proofed it as well, making it fully scalable to cope with other sports events and increasing volumes.

Since no other South African websites – save for airlines and banks – really deal with these volumes of users and transactions, this made it possible for the site to continue to flourish.

The ongoing relationship

“We’ve grown in uptake and grown in exposure,” says Kevin Meltzer. “Our platform is white labeled and offered out by other brands.

We’ve also partnered with SuperSport and developed a platform called Super Dream Teams.

With several other brands on board, we’ve had in excess of 170 000 teams entered in all the competitions we’ve done over the last two years, with over 15 000 people entering fantasy teams for the recent T20 World Cup alone.”

It seems obvious that having architected the solution that saved the site’s bacon, GuruHut would continue the relationship and maintain and adjust the site with every new game and tournament on the sporting calendar.

But, this is not how GuruHut likes to work.

Their company policy is to provide a solution, pass on the knowledge and then remove themselves from the day-to-day maintenance of the technology.

“There will always be things that they need, and in future they will come to us for advice or assistance, and we will engage with them,” says Finnemore “But in the short term, the operational focus has been moved in-house, and that is what we aim to achieve with all of our clients.

”Ultimate Dream Teams now staffs the project themselves, freeing them up from the expense of retaining contractors as a long-term engagement.

GuruHut helped them to establish their competency around the repetitive work of site maintenance and the loading of new competitions.

Naturally Ultimate Dream Teams is happy with this. “The GuruHut team have great skills and have done incredible work for us,” says Kevin Meltzer.

“They put a great deal of effort into the work they do, it’s a trusting relationship, and it will continue in the future.”

GuruHut is a collective of Java software developers who have recently expanded their business to distribute products that support the [...]]]> GuruHut is pleased to announce the local availability of Parasoft Concerto, a product that ensures that quality software can be produced consistently and efficiently, in line with management expectations at every step of the way.

GuruHut is a collective of Java software developers who have recently expanded their business to distribute products that support the implementation and delivery of quality software. In line with this, they have partnered with Parasoft who have over 20 years of experience in the automated testing and quality improvement market.

Parasoft Concerto is a new application lifecycle management (ALM) platform that converts management expectations into actionable, measurable tasks, and then drives expected behaviour throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure delivery of the expected outcomes.

It doesn’t replace existing software development infrastructures, but integrates with all its elements; bug tracking, source control, requirements management systems, testing components and other lifecycle management tools.

The product connects all the elements of an infrastructure together so that human workflow can occur seamlessly in any environment. It also converts policies into tasks so that they are integrated with the software development lifecycle. This increases productivity and reduces costs.

“From our extensive experience of developing software, we know that pulling together diverse requirements and environments can be a mammoth task,” says Len Weincier, CEO and software architect at GuruHut. “This is why a product like Parasoft Concerto makes sense – it focuses the people and allocates the resources where they need to be so that the implementation can deliver on expectations at every stage in the process.”