Collibrium Technologies

Excellence through Collaboration.

Our Streamlining services enable our clients to align application assets and initiatives with critical business processes. We help them introduce and bring into practice application development methods and techniques that ensure quick results with quality software and hence mitigate common risks associated with application development projects.

Applying our deep understanding of diverse technologies and grasp of complex business applications we ensure the success of our clients' application initiatives development undertakings. We bring expertise in: IT management, software methodologies, large scale systems development, and project management. With a rich set of best practices, tools, and techniques we bring excellence to designing software processes, providing technical leadership, and managing the projects.

In the delivery of all our services we are driven by our principle of delivering excellence through collaboration and make reasoned choices for employing methods, tools, and techniques that directly contributes to the successful performance of the application asset cycle tasks.

Streamlining the

Application Planning and Development

Software methodology

We  believe there to be no single software development methodology better than all others in  all situations. We believe the software methodology should be streamlined to the needs and realities of the project at hand. Not the other way around. This does not mean that a new methodology must be created for each project. The methodology should be flexible by design and hence should be configured to the needs of individual projects.

Our point of view is backed by years of experience with dozens of projects. The assumptions underlying the increasingly popular Agile Methods is a testimony to this assertion.

In the information age economy the change is fast, and it can be furious. Organizations must be prepared to respond to the competition and rapidly changing market conditions. They should have the capacity to not only accommodate change but create change as well. The execution of an organization's business today depends to a great extent on its software applications and IT capabilities. Hence, winning in a turbulent environment often depends upon organization's ability to create quality software quickly.

The strict plan-oriented documentation-heavy methodologies which require all projects, large or small, to be tamed to the controls of the methodology can become a hindrance in organization's ability to respond to change. The software methodology must facilitate fast turnaround of the business driven enhancements.

We introduce and help bring into practice software processes that permit the agility needed by the business to act quickly without compromising the quality of the technical and business deliverables. We use the Task and Technology Interaction (TTI™) model to streamline our clients' software methodologies. The TTI™ model is an industry proven and theoretically sound planning process that results in a software development methodology that fits the needs of the organization or the development group/project under study. The resulting plan specifies a set of Agile activities that must be performed to deliver software that meets the business objectives. The plan also provides recommendations for the tools and methods needed to support the software development activities.

Project management

Sound project manage practices are critical to the success of a systems development projects. Our experience as well as many formal studies of project show that the projects fail due to one or more of the following reasons: incomplete or changing requirements, limited user involvement, lack of executive support, lack of technical support, poor project planning, unclear objectives, and lack of required resources.

We believe many of the above reasons for project failure can be corrected with strong project management.

Our observations of the successful projects tell us that the success factors are just the reverse of those for failures. And that is why, we work hard to make sure the projects have clear systems requirements, have substantial user involvement, have support from upper management, have realistic work schedules and mile stones, and are staffed by talented team members. Above all, we are sticklers for detailed project plans throughout our engagement with our clients.

In the execution of our services we embrace the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) principles for managing scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communications, risk, and procurement. In managing the projects we leverage our expertise from practical hands-on experience that covers the full life cycle of enterprise wide applications. Our project management practice covers a wide range of project organization activities including, but not limited to, setting up processes, reporting systems, metrics and tools to monitor project progress.

We also collaborate with our clients to set up a Program Management Office (PMO) to ensure that the projects are completed to meet the technical as well as functional/business requirements.

Technical safeguards

Sound methodology and strong project management can take many risks out of the systems development. Yet, neither is a panacea. They cannot make up for the poor quality of technical work. Mission critical business applications must be reliable, robust, preferment, and secure. They must also be maintainable and should have high reusability and user friendliness. Above all they must deliver the functionality needed by the users.

High quality systems require much forethought, technical prudence, and experiential skilfulness in the up stream stages of the systems development.  

We believe three technical aspects of the software life cycle are absolutely critical to the short and long term success of the systems. They are:

· Requirements Specifications,

· Application Architecture, and

· Quality Assurance.

 

Our approach to requirements specification is both agile and fastidious. In software development requirements are everything, and they change all the time. We believe it is far more important for the software to deliver business value than enforcing the controls against changes. Therefore, instead of resisting the changing requirements we welcome them. We use agile techniques to keep the projects in the safety zone. We have extensive experience in use case writing. At times our clients engage us for the sole purpose of use case writing.

We are pragmatists when it comes to architecting business applications. We harness the skills, the foresight, and the understanding of complex systems we have gained through years of developing mission critical systems. We understand importance of taking into consideration the evolution of the business needs while delivering software that meets the immediate requirements in compressed time frames. We work with our clients in the definition of platforms to build the applications and designing applications that are maintainable, extensible, and scalable. We use UML to develop domain object models, develop data models, if needed establish rules for object-relational mapping, define application frameworks and utilize design patterns to define a scalable and extensible architecture. We often assist our clients in developing UML models (class, interaction, collaboration, state, and deployment) for complex system requirements.  

We are thorough and incisive in our approach to quality assurance. We assist our clients in quality assurance planning and putting the plan into practice. The quality assurance practice covers more than testing the software. It includes the maintenance and enforcements of quality standards for various software artifacts, work products (e.g., documents and meeting minutes), and software development processes integrated throughout the software life cycle. With our experience in agile techniques we collaborate with our clients in initiating and institutionalizing test-first coding and continuous and automated integration testing. 

Enterprise architecture

Business applications can no longer be developed in isolation. The value of a new application as it relates to the rest of the IT assets must be well understood and its effect on the bottom line must be visible. While meting the immediate business requirements a new application must also support the strategic goals of IT.

 

Organizations fail to leverage their past IT investments, when perfectly useful components and services may already exist in the enterprise, ready to deliver more value through reuse or integration. Instead, too many applications are built from scratch, time and again.

The new applications instead of adding redundant capabilities must leverage the existing ones. Adding new capabilities without introducing redundancies  is not simple.  Organizations lack visibility into their existing software asset portfolio and its connection to their funded projects. Therefore, it is hard to plan for reuse, for architecture compliance, or software consolidation. Effective management and exploitation of information through IT is the key to business success, and the indispensable means to achieving competitive advantage. An enterprise architecture addresses this need, by providing a strategic context for the evolution of the IT system in response to the constantly changing needs of the business environment. Additionally, the architecture enables organizations to achieve the right balance between IT efficiency and business innovation.

Our Enterprise Architecture services enable the following:

·  a map of current and future state IT assets, 

· business processes supported by the those assets,

· a set of governance principles for planning new applications, and

· enterprise-wide view of software asset portfolio.

We work with our clients to develop their enterprise architecture that enables more agility, higher levels of reuse, increased compliance to corporate standards, and greater value from your existing software investments.