Smallworld Electric Office is a software solution that allows and facilitates the planning, management, analysis, design, and support of electric networks. As an Accredited GE Smallworld Partner, Astec was tasked with the customization of Smallworld Electric Office. Several big and small enhancements had to be made.
Challenge
The main challenge we had to face was that this Smallworld project was at a very early stage and the requirements were not well defined. We had to use our experience to fill out gaps in requirements and prepare a series of prototypes as a form of dialogue with the customer. The team had to be self-organized and well-balanced.
Solution
The main goal of this project was to implement a set of new and updated features for the Electric Office. The project was delivered in close cooperation with one of GE’s key customers. We helped to translate a handful of ideas and comments into a set of fully functional prototypes and, as a result, new EO features.
GE Energy engaged 4 senior developers from ASTEC to work on this project. The ASTEC team working with GE consisted of 1 technical leader, 1 tester, 1 project manager, and 1 product owner. The team worked on a number of tasks which were first sized and added successively to sprint runs. Each task, after implementation, was reviewed, tested, and accepted. We used JIRA for task and project management.
Results
Over the range of several sprints, we managed to enhance Electric Office with:
• Solar and small power stations based planning and maintenance
• Transmission structure cathodic protection (CP)
• Electric Vehicle charge locations
• Advanced Metering Infrastructure Objects – infrastructure planning and maintenance
• Improvements for cost objects and macro assemblies
For each new feature, we created automated tests – unit or integration tests.
Our success was that most of the prototypes found their way to the product release.