Development Process Consultancy

Situation

In an increasingly competitive market place it is important to make the best use of R&D funding. After a recent successful contract Abelon was asked by the customer to provide an expert assessment of their software development process and to suggest modifications where appropriated. The goal of this analysis was to ensure their process conforms to best industry practice, is efficient and that new products could be released on schedule with the high quality expected.

Solution

Abelon described its own in-house development process as an example of best industry practice. We analysed the customer’s software development process, highlighting a number of areas where working practices could be improved and where better software tools could be deployed:

Peer Review – The customer lacked a fully implemented formal review process. Although steps were being taken to address this issue the existing process was limited in scope. Abelon demonstrated how peer reviews help to enforce sufficient design and testing rigour to reduce design faults and coding errors.

Change Control Tool – The source code control tool in use by the customer was unable to cope with the requirements of a modern multiple user development process. In particular files had to be locked before changes were made and no automated software merge utility was available. Abelon recommended an alternative source code control tool.

Testing - The customer had no formal software testing procedure. Amongst other things this meant that code was not always fully tested before being committed into the repository. Abelon recommended the formal unit and system test procedure we use in-house and how this would be integrated into the customers overall development process.

Bug Fix/Feature Enhancement Tracking - Although the customer made use of a bugs database for released products within the support department, they had no way to track bug fixes and new features within the engineering department. Abelon recommended a freely available bug/feature tracking with a Web front end.

Please see our Products page for more details on the services we can provide in project management and consultancy.