Assessment

Case Study: Software Portfolio Assessment

Industry

Financial Services

Problem Statement

The client was a global bank with hundreds of branches and thousands of financial advisors in the United States. The purpose of the portfolio management system was to provide accurate, up-to-date cost basis information in a timely and professional manner.

The management of the information service division of this major global bank engaged 741 Studios to review its applications architecture and development practices to help find additional ways to meet the goals of fast changing business requirements through tighter alignment with business partners, development agility, and reduction of time-to-market.

How we Helped

741 Studios assessed the overall application environment, and performed a more detailed review of core applications covering different business areas and technologies.

Analysis also included code review for a number of selected applications to assess software quality attributes such as: operational resiliency, performance, scalability, configurability, maintainability, extendibility and design.

Resulting findings were grouped according to the following areas:

• Organization and process
• Application architecture
• Software development

One of the core recommendations was to introduce a SOA/BPM architecture and supporting development processes to the enterprise. Recommendation was accepted and implemented by the client.

Case Study: SOA/BPM Vendor Selection

Industry

Financial Services

Problem Statement

In order to obtain full benefits of SOA/BPM architecture the client decided to standardize on a vendor platform which would serve as the solid foundation for the SOA/BPM initiative. 741 Studios was tasked with defining the process and steering the execution of vendor selection.

How we Helped

We started with research of SOA/BPM vendors who have the products that supported specific client requirements.

Based on our experience we laid out a plan which included the following:

• Make a decision whether to pick a single vendor or best of breed products (SOA platform, BPM product, Rules engine, BAM, Policy Management, etc.)
• Narrow down vendor-candidates who's products meet specific client requirements to 3-4 vendors.
• Create use case to be implemented by vendors which would demonstrate out-of-the-box capabilities.
• Create detailed matrix of required features, and corresponding scoring mechanism for vendor evaluation.
• Coordinate vendor presentations of their products and demonstration of their use case implementation.
• Narrow down vendor list to 2 candidates and ask them to participate in a “bake-off” where they would perform the implementation of the use cases in the client environment.
• Demonstrate the implementation and hold Q&A sessions with the client representatives from interested teams: architects, developers, infrastructure, support.
• Get scoring of individual product features from teams representatives.
• Calculate the final combined scoring based on the suggested scoring methodology
• Hold final discussions of the results. In parallel with technical discussions, conducted business negotiations with vendor-candidates
• Select the vendor

The bake-off stage was split into 4 phases:

• Phase Zero consisted primarily of client tasks detailing a use case specification document (developed by 741 Studios), identifying success criteria for each subsequent phase of bake-off (developed by 741 Studios), setting up and configuring development and run-time environment for bake-off.
• Phase One was defined to demonstrate out-of-the-box product capabilities by each of two vendor candidates. It included:
  • Administration/management capabilities (Governance Consoles, Workflow Management Console, System management [monitoring] consoles and events)
  • Design-Time tools - Process Designer, Services orchestration and integration, Debugging capabilities
  • Run-time - run implemented use case on the vendor stack (ESB, BPM, Policy Manages, etc.) in the client environment
  • Execute performance test to establish a baseline measuring throughput, response time for the tasks within the use case.
• Phase Two included modifications to the original use case developed in Phase One and embraced additional business process tasks, new user entitlements, secure web services with policies, integration with LDAP, changes in routing rules, using client provided web services accessing DB2 and CICS on the mainframe, and JMS calls to M-Queue. This phase also demonstrated services lifecycle management, deployment of new services and design tools capabilities for integration and process modeling.
• Phase Three included performance tests on the modified use cases with 100 concurrent users as well as a 24 hour endurance test

SOA/BPM platform vendor was selected. Request processing system is implemented on this vendor platform and is deployed into production.

Case Study: Quality Assurance for Workflow Projects Recommendation

Industry

Financial Services

Problem Statement

741 Studios was engaged to assess the client's QA organization capabilities and processes and to provide recommendations which would allow the client to maximize QA efficiency in the light of the planned introduction of SOA/BPM architecture and corresponding technology platform.

How we Helped

We reviewed the following areas within the QA organization: skills and experience, offshore capabilities, methodologies and practices, tools and technologies, and physical environment. Based on this analysis we identified the issues which could negatively impact QA efficiency and provided recommendations to mitigate these deficiencies.

741 Studios additionally pointed out new QA tasks and process changes that would be necessary within a SOA/BPM environment. Some of the specific recommendations in this area were related to the role and responsibilities of a QA organization, and communication with business and development partners in the context of service development lifecycle.

We suggested changes to the QA process to accommodate new development artifacts (Web Services and process models) and outlined the approach to developing corresponding test cases and to providing test data. Special attention was devoted to the best test practices which would help to reduce the risk of breaking existing applications with the changes to the shared services.

741 Studios reviewed test automation tools utilized by the client's QA organization and evaluated suitability of these tools for SOA/BPM test automation. As a result we recommended an additional tool to help with functional and performance testing of services and workflows.