Enhancing Telegraph Media Group’s legacy code to streamline printing operations

Softwire quickly turns around important enhancements to legacy codebase, to enable newspaper publisher to streamline printing.

The customer and requirement

Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is one of the largest providers of news in the UK. Its printed newspapers are an important part of its business.

To optimise the efficiency of its newspaper print-runs, TMG needed to enhance a key application that controls the printing presses. This would enable it to automate tasks its people were having to do manually. The potential savings involved meant TMG was keen for the project to be completed as soon as possible. The work demanded high-calibre software engineers, able to quickly get to grips with and make changes to a complex legacy codebase.

Softwire’s solution

Having assessed the requirements, we identified that this needed a single software engineer to work closely with the customer’s product owner. Our engineer was supported by colleagues in Softwire who provided light-touch customer relationship management and technical oversight.Within two weeks of TMG approaching us, we started work, and delivered the enhancements after a further 20 days.

The outcome

After this point, our engineer worked with TMG’s testing team, providing support and delivering bug fixes on an ad hoc basis. The customer has since signed off the work, and at the time of writing is in the process of final implementation with its printing press partner.