system analyst and adjunct cio business analyst and technical writer


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CONSIDER THIS!

Does your organization...

» Build complex software applications?
» Apply software-based solutions to complex business problems?
» Have trouble defining and/or following a software development process?

Answered yes to any of these? Read the story.

We can help.

A  STARTUP DELIVERS!

The Challenge

Three entrepreneurs with a track record for success in starting businesses wanted to create a software application to accelerate the process of getting software products to market. This application would enable software development firms to manage the software release cycle and monitor their production vendors.

The software had to help software companies organize and manage their digital assets in a secure environment. Digital assets such as software code, images, and documentation had to be tied to the individual component line items in a bill-of-materials (BOM). Status information about each component must be shared between internal organizations and suppliers in real time via high speed and high bandwidth VPN connections eliminating the need for courier services.

This company wanted to deliver an enterprise-class, web-based software application to their customers without hiring and operating a software development center preferring to focus management attention on business issues. The application had to be based on industry standards and provide capabilities not available anywhere else.

The Solution

Vin D'Amico formed a team that designed and built that enterprise web application for storing, managing and retrieving digital assets. The project went through the complete software development lifecycle from requirements gathering to design, implementation, test and deployment using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and design patterns.

Vin conducted Joint Requirements Planning (JRP) sessions with this client to bring out their ideas so we could define features and functions. This technique focused on use-case analysis. The approach is centered around user activities and what the software must do to support them.

The team went on to build the application using an iterative development process that Vin created based on Scrum, XP and RUP. The application was installed at a major local storage company and has been rock solid!

The Result

Our team was able to create an application that processes massive amounts of data (several hundred megabytes per product) securely and reliably. Close cooperation enabled us to deliver a major enterprise application to a major storage company and in so doing, launch an enterprise software company.

According to the client, the application "...simply refuses to go down. This stability, durability and reliability allows us and our customers to focus on business versus the underlying technology."



That's how good teams operate. Each member focuses on what he or she does best. To learn more about Joint Requirements Planning, read this article called "Joint Requirements Planning Works!".

















Technical details

Technical Details

For those of you who want to know more about the underlying technologies, the following were used:

»Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)
»HTML
»Java
»Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
»Java Server Pages (JSP)
»Javascript
»Jbuilder (Borland)
»MagicDraw (NoMagic)
»Oracle Database
»Structured Query Language (SQL)
»Java Development Kit (Sun JDK)
»Sun Solaris
»StarTeam (Borland)
»WebLogic (BEA)

The application has a browser-based user interface driven through a servlet employing the Abstract Factory design pattern. User requests are forwarded through the Factory to a set of Enterprise Java Beans that interface to an Oracle database.

Assets can be stored and retrieved individually or in groups. Transactions are recorded to create an audit trail. They can also be scheduled in advance and entered into an event list.

If you want to know more, please feel free to email us!