Upskilling the Development Team
to Provide Reusable And Scalable Applications

Sharing knowledge and helping customers build new skills through pair programming

While the software development experts from Grape Up joined the team responsible for developing the apps, they stumbled upon the common obstacles that can be met in projects that don’t utilize cloud-native application architecture, agile methodologies in software delivery and Design Thinking in prototyping a product. Customer’s developers used to build products that meet a particular need without planning the future possibilities of application improvements.

Brought to Allstate to not only rebuild its products but mainly to upskill its developers, cloud-native experts from Grape Up, experienced in working with established enterprises, used the most effective way to encourage client’s teams to new technologies and approaches. While rebuilding the apps, they showed how long-term planning and flexible architecture enable faster development. With every milestone and numerous training, developers from Allstate have been more willing to adopt those techniques.

In order to help their partners smoothly implement practices that improve software delivery and its capabilities to be reusable, Grape Up utilized pair programming as a manner of sharing knowledge. It’s an extremely useful yet effective way of skilling up other developers. With this approach, two people work together on the same task and code – they have one workstation and two monitors displaying the same piece of work. The first one is performing a task, the second one is monitoring and supporting, sharing best practices, and explaining the issues that occur during the working session.

Pair programming accelerated training and allowed Allstate to improve their expertise. While the project came to an end, the customer team was ready to work independently and focus on developing the apps as they have been used countrywide.

By developing apps in hand with experts from Grape Up, the Allstate team build new skills required to create cloud-native software

Allstate, empowered by Grape Up, achieved all the projects’ goals. Applications were re-factored and built on cloud architecture. The development team met deadlines and delivered products that can be easily customized and improved. What’s important from a business perspective; collaboration resulted in fully configurable products that offer its services to the customers from the entire US market and particular features are displayed based on the local law and insurance policy. After the heavy lifting stage, Allstate continued development independently, which showed that training went well.

Along with rebuilding its software products, Allstate achieved an incredible outcome in software delivery. Their development team implemented Design Thinking to software prototyping and encouraged its members to build their application with an approach that takes into account its future development, reusability, and scalability. Many of Allstate’s employees have mastered their skills in used technologies, frameworks and tools. Time savings gained through implementing Agile, and visible in accelerated delivery, encouraged team leaders from Allstate to use them on a daily basis.

The collaboration between Allstate and Grape Up shows that the most effective way to improve skills and promote a culture that speeds up software delivery comes to support their own team with external experts, leaders in using these technologies and approaches. By tackling real challenges and developing already created products, members of the Allstate team gained experience that will impact the process of building software in the future.