Stuart Selip’s Closer Look at: Standards
Updated: Dec 29, 2022
Who cares about standards? YOU should!
Why?
Standardized products and services are valuable because they:
Provide consistent quality
Minimize learning curve
Support compatibility
Promote Portability
Rather than asking why we need standards, we might usefully ask ourselves what the world would be like without standards. What would it be like to have to relearn how to operate a new car, a new phone or a new computer every time? Not very productive, for sure!
Likewise, one can reap benefits from IT standards in software engineering technologies. Like the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), for example.
MDA proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) defines an approach to information systems specification that separates the specification from the implementation.
In this article, I will describe a success story of how a standards-based Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to building software allows a large, complex software system to be delivered in a tight time frame, with high quality.
It is a project that took place in 2005 and 2006, in the state of Ohio. The Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) project had an aggressive delivery completion time line of 18 months. The selected System Integration (SI) vendor opted to use a MDA tool to facilitate the development process.
The system was delivered in Java, while many of the development team members had little or no previous experience with that language, its supporting technologies, or the iterative software development lifecycle approach used to drive the project.
The results were:
The MDA tool multiplied the productivity of the developers making 10 day delivery iterations possible by generating all of the “drudge” code while developers focused on delivering “exciting” stuff like business rules and process flows
Users and stakeholders gained confidence in the 10 day process, and gave rapid feedback to developers, avoiding late-term “surprises”
Despite a project-long 56% delivery team turnover, the architectural rigor of the MDA tool, and the high-quality UML models meant the project delivered on time, and with “right” scope
NonStop and MDA
Good news! Now you can benefit from rapid application development for NonStop using MDA!
TIC Software, using the MDA tool suite from our business partner BluAge, is helping customers build NonStop Java applications quickly.
Our UML models are used to generate code that leverages popular Java frameworks like “Hibernate” and “Spring”. This means we are free to focus on building business logic and solving business problems for you, rather than wrestling with technical “application burden” issues like middle-tier object management and data persistence. You gain access to popular but complex frameworks so they deliver results instead of creating delay and frustration. As the Java world evolves and new frameworks and techniques appear, the BluAge MDA tool will evolve in parallel, making the “new” accessible and available with no disruption.
What’s the take-away? MDA, Agile, and Iterative software development are all standards-based, and in the hands of a committed team, provided a synergism that delivered complex mission-critical software for the State of Ohio on time, and with high quality.
Whether you are interested in brand-new development, or want to re-engineer your existing COBOL applications into Java, TIC and MDA will make things happen more quickly, with higher quality, and lower solution lifecycle cost.
Are you ready to learn more about TIC, MDA and NonStop? Schedule a conversation by emailing us at TIC Sales.
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Stuart Selip owns and operates Principal Consulting, LLC, an IT Strategy consulting firm that is a business partner of TIC Software. Prior, as the Chief Executive Officer of Luxoft’s Consulting Strategies unit, he managed delivery of IT Strategy consulting to Fortune 500/Global 2000 firms in the Financial Services, Insurance, and Media industries.
TIC Software, a New York-based company specializing in software and services that integrate NonStop with the latest technologies, including Web Services, .NET and Java. Prior to founding TIC in 1983, Phil worked for Tandem Computer in technical support and software development.