Burst

C A PA B I L I T Y S TAT E M E N T

Burst
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About
QBurst, with offices in Fairfax (Virginia, USA),
Sheffield (England, UK) and Trivandrum
(Kerala, India), is a software services company
that provides services in web 2.0 and mobile
application development. Having developed
enterprise-grade products for several successful
startups and medium-sized enterprises, QBurst
has earned the reputation of being a high-tech
cost-effective service provider. QBurst's delivery
cycle is much faster compared to large
consulting companies, and as a QBurst client
you get personalized attention. We have much
more in-depth knowledge of web 2.0 and mobile
technologies compared to most of the large
consulting houses.

Mission
"To be a world leader in developing custom web and
mobile applications for startups, small and medium
enterprises".

History
QBurst was started in India in 2004 by three software professionals. They had a wide-range of development
and consulting experience before starting QBurst. The initial clients of QBurst were startups having small
budgets but with big dreams. QBurst helped them quickly develop robust, fast, scalable and highly-available
applications within their tight budgets. The apps were developed in small and short iterations following the
principles of agile development. This enabled these startups to reach their target audience early, engage
users, get continuous feedback and then make quick changes to their applications to meet real end-user
needs. These companies were able to quickly change course according to market conditions. QBurst started
growing steadily when some of these startups (like freepatentsonline.com) became immensely successful.

In 2008, QBurst started its US and UK subsidiaries, QBurst USA, Inc and QBurst UK. QBurst currently
employs 140 professionals that include developers, graphic designers, QA, business analysts, architects,
XHTML/CSS specialists and so on. QBurst is providing the same agile-style methodologies to established
companies like Plusnet, a broadband services provider in UK and a wholly owned British Telecom subsidiary,
to enhance their legacy applications.

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Management
QBurst's original founders - Binu Dasappan, Prathapan Sethu and Ansar Shahabudeen - now lead the
company and set its technological and business directions. They work to ensure that QBurst recruits and
retains the best developers. They are also involved in setting up of company-wide processes. In addition,
QBurst has a second tier of highly technical Project Managers who manage the projects on a day-to-day basis
and liaise with the customers.

Facilities and Infrastructure

QBurst has 4 offices in the following locations: Fairfax, Virginia,
USA; Sheffield, England, UK; Trivandrum, Kerala, India; and
Technopark, Kerala, India. All offices are physically secured and
have high-speed Internet connections. Internet connections are from
multiple service providers which are load-balanced and hot backup
enabled. This ensures that our Internet connection is highly-
available. The Indian offices have UPS and diesel generator (DG)
backups for ensuring uninterrupted power.

QBurst projects are done in close collaboration with our clients. We have SCRUM-style daily standup
meetings in which clients participate remotely using video conferencing. We currently use Skype for VoIP
and video conferences. The Indian office has US phone numbers, which are enabled using Skype-in.
Similarly, our employees can call their customers anytime using Skype-out services. In addition, we have
desktop sharing software which we use for collaboration.

QBurst has several offsite servers located in US, UK and Canada. These dedicated servers are located close
to our customers to avoid latency issues and remotely managed by QBurst. The servers host our project
management and tracking software, as well as integration and staging environments for our clients. Our
servers and QBurst network are protected by firewalls which are frequently tested for penetration to make sure
they are highly secure.

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Services
LAMP development - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl or Python, Symfony, CakePHP, Zend
Java development - J2EE, J2ME, Spring, Struts, Hibernate, iBatis
.NET development - ASP.NET, Smart-client, Windows Mobile, Silverlight
Flash / Flex development - AS2, AS3
AJAX - Scriptaculous, Prototype, Dojo, YUI, Ext JS, MooTools,jQuery
Cloud based development - Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2, S3, SalesForce
Content Management Systems - Drupal, Joomla
Full-text Search - Lucene
Document Management - Alfresco, SharePoint
Workflows / Business Process Management - jBPM, BizTalk
Automated testing services - Selenium
Performance improvement and scaling of existing apps
Security testing - SQL injection, XSS attacks
Ruby on Rails, RSpec & Mongrel
Python & Django

Project Management
We typically use a hosted instance of Trac or Redmine for project management. Customers are also given
access to the project tracking software. Trac and Redmine have integrated version control (Subversion), wiki,
task and milestone management, document management and bug tracking facilities. In addition, we have
integrated build tools like Cruise Control. Our clients can get all project related documentation and reports in
one central place accessible from anywhere.

The application under development is hosted from day 1. This allows the client to get deeply involved in the
development process and provide early feedback.

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Quality
QBurst's goal is to deliver quality products to our customers, which means products that meet all the functional
as well as non-functional requirements such as speed, scalability, reliability, availability and maintainability.

We rely on agile processes to achieve our goals. We understand that requirements evolve and change during
the project life cycle and definitely during the product lifetime. These changes may be driven by new
technologies, which change user expectations. Changes become necessary when your organization grows
where you could go from a shared hosting to a dedicated server to maybe a load balanced server cluster (if
your application becomes very popular). There is no such thing as future-proofed software. Source code must
undergo continuous enhancements and refactoring. This is where agile methodologies play an important role
in. By creating automated unit and functional tests, developers get the confidence to continuously refactor and
improve. Changes to source code that break the application are caught by running automated tests.

A project is split into multiple time-boxed iterations. Depending on the nature of the project, each iteration
would typically last 2 to 6 weeks and would implement a set of use cases and feature sets. Customer
interaction is crucial for the success of iterative projects.

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Featured Projects

QBurst has successfully built and deployed close to one hundred web applications using different MVC web
app frameworks like Symfony, CakePHP, Django, Zend, Struts, Spring, Ruby on Rails, and .NET. We have
extensively used one or more JavaScript and AJAX toolkits like ExtJS, Scriptaculous, Prototype, Dojo, JQuery,
YUI and MooTools to bring richness and responsiveness to the UI. Most of these webapps are powered by
MySQL database, but on some specific developments we have used databases like SQL Server, Oracle and
PostgreSQL. We have also used non-relational databases like Google’s BigTable for one of our app engine
projects and Lucene in a few others where there is a lot of unstructured and text data. These webapps are
hosted in a variety of environments - shared, dedicated, virtual dedicated and of late mostly up there in the
cloud (Amazon EC2, Flexiscale and Google). Mentioned below are some of our interesting projects:

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Full-text Search Engine and Document Delivery System

This site delivers 10 million+ pageviews a month and has an Alexa worldwide rank of 1600. Our
customer who owns this site started operations in 2004 and is now #1 in their space. The
website primarily serves documents. The website primarily serves more than 50 million
documents stored in MySQL database. Read-only replicas of this database allows distribution of
load between multiple servers. The site has a powerful full-text search feature built on top of the
open-source Lucene search engine. Lucene's indexer, indexes the documents in the database
and stores them in multiple index shards. Each shard or fragment is of a manageable size.
Searches are parallelized and handled by around 10 search servers with each server handling a
portion of the index. The results are merged, ranked and served by the web servers. System
architecture is akin to and inspired by Google.

The site is also search-engine friendly with all 50 million documents in the site being spidered
and indexed by Google. The data assets are monetized through Google AdSense and a
document delivery system for paying customers. The site also offers features like saved
searches, search-term alerts and portfolios. The site was developed using PHP, Symfony, Java,
iBatis, Lucene and MySQL. Load balancing and high-availability was achieved by having a
system with multiple web and search servers, and having read-only replicas of the MySQL
database.

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Re-engineering Business Support Systems for a

Residential ADSL Provider
This project was done for a major broadband provider in UK having more than 200,000
customers. Their entire system was built in-house 10 years ago and evolved over the years.
The system could no longer adapt easily to accommodate new requirements. As a result,
launching new products and reacting to competition and market conditions became a slow
process. Even small changes became too time consuming to implement given the level of
testing involved.

QBurst provided resources to work with the customer's development team to undertake a major
re-engineering effort. The team decided to go for API-driven subsystems. Subsystems would
communicate with each other through APIs. Legacy subsystems were wrapped under APIs to
effect a smooth transition. A new MVC framework was created so that development is
streamlined. Permissions were managed within the framework so that developers don't have to
worry about that. Technologies used include PHP 5, custom MVC and ORM frameworks,
JQuery and MySQL.

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Website for Private Flight Booking

We have developed a website that allows travelers in the luxury segment to find and book
private jets. The site is owned by a former Royal Air Force Pilot. Many private aircraft operators
and charter companies in Europe have registered and offer their services through the site. The
system has data about almost all the airfields and even the small runways in Europe.Customers
can place their travel requests with Privatefly, charter companies can bid for the flight and the
best bid wins.The system is integrated with Google Earth and Maps, and was developed in
J2EE using Spring, MySQL, AJAX and iBatis. Privatefly is also the winner of the 2007 Dragon's
Den talent show of travel websites.

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Testing Services for the #1 Widget Platform Company

This customer based in Virginia has the most widely used widget platform in the Internet in
terms of the number of widgets served. Their platform allows widget developers to create,
distribute, share, track and monetize Internet widgets. Widgets can be built using Flash, images
or HTML/JavaScript. The platform allows the widget developer to deploy their widgets into a
number of popular social networking sites (FaceBook, MySpace, Hi5) and widget galleries like
iGoogle. The number of permutations that needed testing is very high given that the customer
needs cross-browser compatibility too.

QBurst was engaged to do QA for the widget platform. Given the fast paced environment,
releases were made frequently and at least once in 2 weeks. This made testing a challenge
since there isn't much time to manually test every combination. So QBurst has started working
toward automation of tests. We have finished automating all the smoke tests, so we can quickly
catch any major problems. We have now started automating the entire set of regression test
cases. Once that is complete, regression can be done in a matter of hours instead of days. This
will give developers faster feedback and will further shorten the development cycle. Most of the
test cases were automated using the Selenium framework. However, Selenium cannot automate
Flash application testing and this is a problem that we are now trying to solve.

Personnel, Equipment and Vendor Management Systems

for a Big Construction Company
This customer is a $350 million construction company having thousands of employees and a
large number of contractors. Headquartered in Dublin, CA, they specialize in heavy, highway
and civil engineering construction. They needed a system to keep track of hourly rates, worker
skill level and training, accidents, disability and insurance information, work and worker locations
and equipment usage and rentals.

QBurst developed the system using Spring, Hibernate, Oracle database and Dojo for automating
the personnel-management related requirements. The key feature of this system is that there is
only one page. The different sections of that page are updated through AJAX calls. This makes it
very usable since all the information about an employee or contractor is accessible from the
same page, thereby improving the efficiency of supervisors. This system also interfaces with the
other enterprise systems like Dispatch, Accounting and Payroll.

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Content Market Place

This is a web app connecting freelance journalists, copywriters, translators and photographers
to media houses. Content creators and publishers can upload content (articles, news items etc)
to the website, and other publishers and content buyers can login with their own accounts,
search for content, and buy at the click of a mouse. Content owners can sell copyrights of their
articles for specific regions. Content is displayed using Macromedia FlashPaper. The site was
developed in ASP.NET (C#) and is powered by a SQL Server database.

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