Software Development Partnership with WordBee – a Leading Translation Management System

The Background

Wordbee is a cloud-based collaborative workspace platform for the management of translation projects (TMS) and Computer Assisted Translation (CAT editor). At present, the company has over 25,000 unique users from all around the world.

As a leading cloud-based, end-to-end translation management system, Wordbee focuses on translation project automation. The company helps its clients improve quality, shorten time-to-market, save money, cut costs, streamline rigorous processes, and improve the overall profit margins.

Thousands of language professionals across the globe use the following Wordbee products daily to translate and localize their content:

• Wordbee Translator (TMS & CAT platform), this is a web-based translation environment where localization and translation professionals can centralize and manage their translation processes as well as HR processes.

• Wordbee Beebox (CMS Plug-in), this software solution translates files, documents or content management systems (CMS) automatically or manually.

The Challenge

As Wordbee continued to expand into new territories and languages, they needed to scale up teams fast and hire highly qualified developers and QAs who could handle the complexity of translation software. Just at the right time, they decided to contact Skelia as far as the company had the relevant expertise and transparent business model.

As a first step, Wordbee set up an interview with two developers from Skelia. The interview went well, so Wordbee executives decided to set a development team. There was also a need to set up QA processes. So two Skelia’s QA’s have joined the Wordbee team. Within one month one of our QA’s became a Head of the whole Wordbee QA team.

Strategic Partnership

Skelia and Wordbee commenced partnership in April 2019, and the collaboration went on for a full year, ending in April 2020. Skelia provided Wordbee with development staff augmentation services on its major projects. The main services included custom development, software testing, bug fixes, and frontend development. To quote Wordbee’s CTO, Skelia provided Wordbee with “top-quality code and helped to streamline their internal processes.”

Skelia operated as a part of a cross border team that included people from Luxembourg, Egypt and Greece. Skelia’s team worked on the same codebase with around 15 to 20 developers of Wordbee’s TMS and CAT development group. The teams also comprised around 1-2 QA persons each. Skelia provided four teammates, two developers and two QA specialists.

The Results

By providing high-quality code, knowledge in writing automation tests and best code review practices, Wordbee managed to streamline all its internal processes.

In detail, Skelia helped Wordbee to release new features for Wordbee Translator using React-Redux. We were responsible for:

• Implementing new features for both web TMS application and API services

• Improving the code review process

• Helping to develop a new version of the CAT tool

• Improving the productivity of current API solutions

• Adding basis for token-based securityJWT authentication

• Fixing issues in the code over the whole system both back and front end

• Improving Unit Testing processes

From QA perspective, Skelia increased the efficiency of development by:

Improving the QA processes on the project (including such areas as, documentation: test cases creation and review; bug/defect templates set up; control over the releases; improved test reporting);

Improving the scrum processes in total – participated with the product and support teams to optimize grooming session and work estimation procedures.

Helping to tighten the integration and collaboration of QA and Support teams.

Implementing
performance/ API testing.