The company is a world-famous telecom equipment manufacturer. One of its core products is a generic hardware and infrastructure server platform designed to host one or more telecom applications and provide reliable and scalable services.
Challenge
The company needed to consolidate the R&D of switching and routing by reducing the number of suppliers and production sites. By that time, our professionals were already providing the customer with development and maintenance services and proven themselves to be reliable partners. With our successful collaboration, the customer assigned Orion as an end-to-end partner for all the R&D activities.
Initially, the products suffered from a number of long-lasting software-related problems, which undermined their quality. Orion was asked to perform knowledge transfer at short notice and promptly show a significant progress in terms of both product quality and new functionality.
Solution
In as little as two months, Orion concluded the knowledge transfer and took over full responsibility for the product design. Right after this, the team launched an ambitious improvement program aimed at:
- Architecture analysis and deployment of systemized technical improvements such as a single-thread SNMP handler;
- Introduction of static analysis tools as part of the nightly build procedures;
- Improvement of the test coverage and automated test cases stability, including the implementation of a Continuous Integration framework.
All of the above was done in parallel with the development of new features requested by the customer. As part of this project, we have also implemented a VLAN translation feature that enables the product users to significantly reduce the time and complexity of the initial system configuration and its further adjustments.
Results
After six months of full product responsibility, the team accomplished the following:
- Reduction of the total number of defects from 50+ to a single-digit backlog
- Stabilization of the test and CI environment: the number of successful CI runs has increased from under 50% to over 80%
- Reduced cost by improving R&D efficiency
Major Features:
- Security updates for switching and routing components (ANSSI)
- IPv4/32 & IPv6/128 route handling
- VRRP tracking BFD, VRRP
- Next-hops in a ECMP group
- Ability to pre-configure port density using DHCP
- BGP support in line with RFC 4271, RFC 4760 and RFC 3392
- NET-SNMP single-thread handling
- Excessive number of LSAs in OSPF DB (OSPF DB limits)
Technologies:
Backend:
- C/C++
- Java
- Erlang
Network:
- Broadcom StrataXGS NPU
- IPv4/IPv6 stack
- SNMP
- NetConf
- L2: 1G/10G/40G Ethernet, VLAN
- L3+: OSPFv2/v3, BGP-4/BGP-4+
