CyberSports teams with Xoomworks to score Football Superstars winnersOnline soccer venture goes from strength to strength - Dominating the online sports game market In November 2008, using reliable state-of-the-art technology, CyberSports Ltd published ‘Football Superstars’ - a truly ground-breaking, exciting and compelling game - into a huge and rapidly growing global market. Football Superstars, the first truly mainstream massively multi-player online game (MMOG), provides football game-play where each player controls one character on the pitch. Off pitch, thousands of individual characters live a life of glory, fame and luxury in a utopian football-based virtual world. CyberSports’ aim is to dominate the online sports game market by building and operating integrated persistent 3D virtual multi-player multi-sports worlds that appeal to both casual and hardened gamers alike. Football Superstars was the brainchild of Malcolm Clark (now Chief Executive Officer of CyberSports) - an experienced and pragmatic program manager with a record of successfully building and managing large teams and motivating them to deliver difficult and complex strategic projects to tight timescales and budgets. Partnering with the experts In planning Football Superstars, CyberSports fully recognised the complex technicalities of designing and developing such a revolutionary multi-player online game and realised that it needed skilled and highly experienced software engineers to ensure the project maintained the highest standards of reliability and usability to guarantee growth and success. Having decided that outsourcing part of its operation would enable it to expand, control costs and gain vital technical expertise, CyberSports evaluated several technology and business consulting companies before deciding to partner with Xoomworks – an established IT services company that has an enviable track-record of delivering the complete range of consulting and outsourcing services to major blue-chip global companies including Sony, EMI, BSkyB, Betfair, Universal Pictures International, Nokia and Warner Bros. In selecting Xoomworks as its outsourcing partner, CyberSports cited Xoomworks’ technical excellence and unrivalled industry experience. A particular attraction was that Xoomworks had adopted Agile development methodologies to encourage direct interaction between developers and product owners. This, combined an established software development centre in Romania (an EU country with a highly developed IT education system) and a ‘One Team’ approach (in which members of the teams in Romania closely interact with their counterparts in the UK) convinced CyberSports that that had found their partner of choice. A focus on quality assurance Working closely with CyberSports, Xoomworks established a dedicated environment in the ancient university city of Cluj-Napoca in western Romania, buying the necessary IT hardware and software. Within weeks of entering the public ‘beta’ phase of the Football Superstars project, Xoomworks had recruited and trained highly experienced programming and development teams to oversee technical operations and software quality assurance including the 24x7 monitoring and maintenance of CyberSports’ hardware, systems and applications hosted at their UK data centre. “Our software testing covered the whole Football Superstars game application, its website and e-payment systems,” explained Nic Hutchins, Xoomworks’ Managing Director. “The focus is on Quality Assurance Automation - automated testing to improve regression and efficiency and to support maintenance and issue solving.” Working in partnership Xoomworks created support and development processes and improved documentation and communications across teams located in the different geographical locations. Throughout the whole project, Xoomworks worked in partnership with their CyberSports colleagues, providing feedback to improve processes and communications and initiating innovative approaches that improved the reliability and functionality of the Football Superstars site, contributing to better experience for the end user. As keen online gamers in their spare time, Xoomworks engineers in Romania were also pleased to pass on suggestions for improving Football Superstars gained from their experience in the virtual world. Within three months Football Superstars had more than 250,000 registrations and 10,000 unique visitors every day and had established itself as the world’s only mainstream online football gaming community. In 2009, CyberSports was selected by the Guardian as one of the UK’s top 100 companies for innovation and creativity.
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“Outsourcing is usually a low-cost option offering lower levels of skill and competence. But with Xoomworks in Romania we’ve seen an increased level of quality.”
“Xoomworks are doing a great job for us, providing very high quality technical services and have enabled us to tap into skills we would find it difficult to access in the UK.Xoomworks is an excellent company to work with. They are proving invaluable in our continued expansion and the success of Football Superstars.”
Xoomworks team
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