www.litoralulromanesc.ro is the largest website specialized in seaside tourism, with accommodation deals and offers throughout the Romanian Coast. They have direct contracts with over 500 hotels on the Romanian coast and over 200,000 tourists/year choose them as their trusted travel consultant. 

Due to their high volume of work, and because their HR department wanted to reduce the time spent on their employment routines, they contracted Wesrom for development and QA (Quality Assurance) staff augmentation. This flexible hiring model offered Litoralul Romanesc the opportunity to increase staff, without the need for time-intensive hiring initiatives or having to keep technical staff after their project is over. The resources they provided were Dropbox, an online payment platform, BitBucket, JIRA and a Project Manager. 

Problem

Finding new staff takes much time and effort, which made in-house hiring expensive for Litoralul Romanesc. Also, long term staff turnover is rising today and tradeoffs between quality and budgets get tough. The best option for them was externalizing this process to Wesrom. A lot of hardware and software problems had to be fixed in the backend of their database. They had problems in their MySQL server, their database lacked structure, as it was not optimized in terms of tables, their columns were exceeding character limits, which caused an overall slow performance of queries and memory leaks. Moreover, they had server memory issues, with their PHP often running out of memory. 

The Goal

Litoralul Romanesc needed to support its clients with a reliable IT infrastructure and data center that is safe, secure, responsive and free of spam.

Solution

A full time team of two developers and one quality assurance specialist with a comprehensive set of skills helped Litoralul Romanesc to fix bugs and develop new features in order to skyrocket their operations. 

Some of the Development team’s responsibilities were:

• Bug fixing;
• Improvements on different code scripts;
• Refactoring some sections (IPN, client billing address unification, invoice documents)
• Integrating third party apps, such as: Hoteliera, Mondial Insurance;
• Adding new features to the platform like: XML OUT logs, public endpoints for external systems, functionality for adding the reservation cancellation reason, functionality for sending the reservation feedback email, possibility to add multiple billing details for same client (tourist), updated the payment and cancellation policy, extra discounts, rate plans and many more.

The QA’s team responsibilities were to create a test plan (sanity check) documentation using TestLink and check all fixes and new implementations on dev/staging/live environments. 

Results

By outsourcing their IT infrastructure resources to Wesrom, Litoralul Romanesc was able to:

• Increase the flexibility and capacity of their team as our resources were contracted only for two years.  
• Get high productivity levels as Wesrom’s developers were 100% focused on their project. 
• Close the skill gap in their in-house IT team with the talent needed to fulfill current business objectives.
• Cut operational costs as they didn’t have to pay administrative and organizational expenses like office rent, utility bills and equipment. 
• Have access to a large number of prequalified, senior developers at a moment’s notice, to be able to scale their operations as more accelerated development is required.
• Have access to Wesrom’s technical leads who, on various occasions, bring valuable inputs to the table, removing blockers quickly and otherwise increasing productivity.