Managing Software Quality

We all aim to build software with zero defects, but that can prove to be expensive, time consuming and next to impossible if the correct processes, checks and balances are not in place. This short article is to identify the key points in the process to focus on in order to help ensure that defects are manageable.

What Requirements?

They key points in this area is how they are gathered, documented, agreed and just as importantly communicated to the development team. This has a large impact on what the perceived quality of the software and whether it in fact 'delivers', but this has to be balanced with the required timelines. A typical example would be use cases, these for most software builds are essential. Use cases document what the users need from the system and how they will use the system, this in turn educates the developers (which mostly do not have direct contact with the sometimes high profile end users) and QA and in turn increases the changes of delivering software that is fit for purpose. Using a system to manage requirements (documenting, sharing, signing-off, etc..) for larger builds is also recommended, there are many off-the-shelf systems that cater for this. Find the time or risk these end users becoming irate when their requirements are not met.

Speed or Quality?

The amount of time pressure impacts the build quality...fact! Trying to get key features delivered might be more important to the business than how robust the system is in the short-term. That priority also might change over time and what is important is that the stakeholders are deciding what the focus should be on. Some type of systems have no room for defects and in those scenarios having the business putting severe time pressure on their development team will not produce the results they are after. The management of the development team need to be in regular open communication with the stakeholders in order to be singing off the same hymn sheet. This will in turn impact the choices of project methodology (Agile or Waterfall), the testing process and the list goes on and on.

Testing 1,2,3

QA needs to be tailored to the project, but the underlying theme is that if the developers and QA do not have accurate information on how the system features will be used, regardless of how much time and effort is spent, they will still most likely not deliver a polished system. Other key issues for me are environment and ensuring that the development and test environment mirror, as much as possible, the production environment. The final critical element of testing is the structure. The process of producing, consuming and scope of test plans, test cases and test reports should be agreed so that the process of testing is as efficient as possible, saving time and money that can be used in improving the quality of the product.

Measure

The final point that I want to make within the context of this article is to measure the defects within alpha and beta testing and also UAT. This allows a more objective and less emotional view to be taken on the actual quality of the software. Stats that I like seeing are release work items, issues reported and most importantly categories of any reported issues e.g. requirements related, environment related and delivery related. Keeping these stats over a few releases greatly improve the ability to manage the development life cycle. Interestingly we see the greatest impact on the stats to be lack of use case scenarios and this is true across project methodologies.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

2 Tips to Improving Information Productivity

Introduction

Information Productivity is an informal term that refers to how efficient we are at organising and storing our information, emails, documents and in fact any content that relates to our work and processes around our work. Many organisations have systems and formalised processes for these kind of activities, but they usually cater for the storing of information in its traditional forms of documents and some very linear processes, while not offering much in the way of how we share and collaborate in real life.

Sharing

This is by far the most common task that we need to perform with our organisation's information, and not all of it is easily catered for. Depending on your industry you could need to share with co-workers, suppliers, clients and sometimes the public and that is not so easily done. Email tends to be what most of us rely on for sharing, but it comes with many disadvantages, namely size restrictions on mailboxes, aggressive spam filters, receipt confirmation, missed emails and the worst of all... 'email time'. Coming back to your desk to countless emails is not something anyone looks forward to doing. Systems to allow the secure sharing of files will greatly increase productivity levels over a period of time, these range from the relatively simple to far more complicated and expensive alternatives. Bottom line is it should be very easy to securely share and collaborate on information without using email.

Collaboration

Sharing might be the most common task, but collaborating is the clear winner on taking the most time. The process of sending information to 1 or more recipients (see sharing), getting their feedback and then sifting through that feedback, giving feedback on the feedback, incorporating the appropriate feedback and then having every recipient eventually agree to the final form of the information accounts for an enormous amount of time. It doesn't end there, how painful is it then when months later one of the parties wants to question a specific point? How do you find who said what, when and why? For many individuals that accounts for a large part of their day to day responsibilities. There are not many systems that cater for this, but as a bare minimum multiple comments from multiple parties needs to be supported, along with an easy way to compare the comments/changes, accept certain changes and approve final 'versions'. Structured workflows are also not the answer for every eventuality, they might be ideal for some tasks e.g. processing of an invoice, but for day-to-day collaboration a far more fluid system is required.

 

Summary

There are some systems out there that facilitate sharing and collaborating, Synetec have their own, but the purpose of this article is not try and promote a particular system, merely to share what some  key areas are that if focused on could improve productivity. After all, who wants to spend their life reading emails?

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Case Study: Investment Manager Renovates Legacy System

Industry: Financial Services

Introduction: This Investment Manager was frustrated with an old legacy system they had in place, it was not aligned with their business processes and making changes to it in its current form was proving expensive and taking too much time. Team members were wasting time finding workarounds to reconcile the way the business was functioning in the present versus how it was in the past. They wanted a system that would be adaptable in the future, delivered for a reasonable price, within a guaranteed time frame and that wasn't going to impact other projects nor day-to-day operations.

Challenges:

• The business had progressed and the processes had been improved over time, but the old legacy system functionality was not reflecting that. This made the improvements less impactful and more costly to try and retrofit into the old way of doing things that the legacy system had been built around

• As the business was continuing to evolve any small changes that were needed to improve productivity and efficiency were costly, the business needed the system to be more responsive to new requirements going forward

• Many of the key business systems that were required for the business to function relied completely on a few people, which significantly increased the key-man dependency

• Naturally the amount of data had increased over time, but this had a negative impact on the performance of the old legacy system

• Technology that the legacy system was based upon was outdated which made support, maintenance and enhancement expensive and sometimes near impossible

Objectives:

• The project needed to be delivered in a guaranteed time frame in order to meet certain high profile business milestones

• The client had a perfectly capable development team in place, however with other projects and the responsibilities involved with day-to-day operations, they needed a short-term increase to their development capacity in order to get this project delivered, without increasing the head count in the long term

• New business functionality required and likely future requirements had to be quicker and cheaper to implement going forward

• Improve the stability and performance of the system

• Leverage the new functionality and capabilities of updated technologies

• Reduce key-man dependency through use of additional resources and improved documentation

Solution:

The Investment Manager partnered with Synetec in order to deliver a system that retained all the necessary features of the old legacy system while implementing enhancements that team members needed to improve productivity. Not using internal developers allowed the potential risks of systems development to be mitigated and ensured that their business as usual activities were not impacted. The agile renovated system is now far more adaptable to future requirements, which would prevent hesitation in potential process change and reduce expenses going forward.

Benefits:

Forecasts indicate that the maintenance of the system in the future should be reduced by an estimated 20%. The internal developers gained through knowledge transfer from the Synetec development team and are in a better position to incorporate best practises into other projects. System performance has improved by approximately 150% in some areas where users could search and manipulate large data sets, this has been attributed to the redesign of the underlying architecture and the improved performance of the current technology frameworks.

 “Through moving to recent Microsoft technologies we have not only improved performance of the system, but have access to new capabilities that will make delivery of future requirements far more cost effective. Mixing internal and near-sourced developers also proved extremely beneficial for business risk as well as knowledge transfer and I am sure those benefits will be reaped for a long time to come.”

 – Gregory, Technical Director

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Criteria for Successful Software Vendor Selection

The success of selecting a vendor really comes down to one thing: can they deliver? As you seek a vendor keep that in the forefront of your mind at all times.  Any cost savings or operational efficiencies you generate can be quickly negated if your organisation can't get what it really needs on time. Rarely as straightforward as it sounds. The points below are what I categorise as key in terms of what you need to consider when selecting a software vendor?

Good Fit

The software needs to not only meet your key business requirements, but to be easily configurable to work within your environment. It has to be a good fit and that needs to be recognised from the beginning. Depending on the scenario, integration can take anywhere up to 50% of total project time (have often seen instances of longer than this). With that in mind, numerous real-life examples of the software working in a similar environment is extremely helpful and reassuring.

 

Quality and Expertise

That is where the expertise comes in. If the vendor has an experienced team they would have performed similar implementations numerous times in similar environments and they will be in a position to avoid pitfalls and make the process run as smoothly as possible. The quality of the team does not only relate to their technical ability. If the vendor is treating their team well, they will tend to retain them for longer which improves their experience and specifically from your perspective ensures that you are dealing with the same up-to-speed team members. How much wasted time and frustration results from having to explain your requirements or issues to different individuals who are being exposed to them or you for the first time.

Location, Language and Culture

As you seek the vendor for your organization, it’s vital to keep in mind the location, language and culture of their workforce - and more to the point, how it aligns with your organization. Communication issues encompass both language and culture and when dealing with communication of requirements, life is made a great deal easier when requirements that aren't thrashed out to the most finite detail, are grasped implicitly. Cultural sensitivities aside, the best vendor for your needs will have a team that can easily communicate and work with your organization and that usually entails an onshore workforce.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Top 3 Tips to Effective SQL Server Monitoring

Introduction

In a discussion with an infrastructure administrator at one of our clients I was asked how they could become more pro-active about monitoring their SQL Server environment. I think this is a good question because although almost all companies are monitoring whether their SQL Server environment is operational, not all of them are monitoring the key elements that indicate whether the environment might not be operational shortly or to dramatize, indicate imminent disaster.

Effective SQL Server monitoring has to include the ability to forecast any resource issues, monitor the individual environments and being informed in an appropriate response time of any potential issues. Below are some of the key elements of that conversation in an article.

 

Get the right tools

Having a monitoring tool is the first important point to make, I don't really mind whether its bought off-the-shelf or custom-built, but it needs to be configurable, robust and allow the easy monitoring of the key elements without the need for loads of work every time a SQL Server database is a added to the environment. Always use a separate environment for the monitoring tool. Both the server and database need to be separate, it seems obvious, but if your server has failed and your monitoring service is on that server, it doesn't help much. Less importantly, but something to be kept in mind is to choose your monitoring intervals so that they are frequent enough to give you an appropriate response time, but not so frequent as to affect your servers performance. Routinely test your monitoring tool and also the impact the monitoring is having on your server's performance, especially after the addition of a new server or database to your environment. On that note any new servers in your environment should be automatically added to the monitoring tool.

Devil is in the documentation

Documentation is an ugly word to most, but a necessary evil. In order to effectively monitor your SQL Server environment you need to know database and server configurations, any changes to these, how they deviate from the normal default values and the company standards. In summary we need to monitor server properties, database properties, instance configuration, database configuration and security. This data should be collected across all servers and then stored in a central repository and the collection should be automated.

Watch this space

So we have our monitoring tool, but what do we need to be sure we are watching? Backups is the first and most obvious port of call. Are the various database backups running, that includes the full backups, any differential backups and the log backups. Monitoring of the storage location for availability is also recommended. Next would be the SQL Agent jobs and monitoring whether any failed, did any take abnormally long and any jobs that failed to run. A potentially crucial difference exists between jobs that don't run and jobs that run, but fail. Speaking of space, monitoring of database file sizes is essential. You should monitor not only certain set milestones (i.e. 80% ), but also the rate of growth over time, which is vital in planning for extra disk-space.

Next, we would list memory, CPU and I/O, and again these would need to be tracked over time. These metrics, looked at as a collection of information, especially over time can help diagnose any problem or potential problem areas. Then lastly, we would definitely want to monitor any specific issues such as deadlocks, extended blocked processes, long running queries, index issues, high severity errors and timeouts.

 

Conclusion

The main objective is to enable you to identify and respond to problems as quickly as possible, ideally before they even occur. This strategy will enable you to find the problem areas and improve the performance of the servers and the applications that use them over time. I have seen many instances, if you will excuse the pun, of organisations with properly configured monitoring tools in place identify and fix SQL Server issues before users are even aware of them.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of software services and solutions.

Case Study: Hedge Fund implements new information management system

Case Study

Hedge Fund implements new information management system

Industry: Financial Services

Objective: Provide a system which consolidates all internal sources of data, specifically research and emails

IT Objectives:

• Deliver automated collation and indexing of all trade, research and email related information across systems and formats

• Implement a user-friendly and reliable system that enables authorised company employees to locate enriched information

• Reduce cost and time for access to company information

• Reduce load and increase performance of Exchange server

Business Objectives:

• Enable employees to locate and share related information from various sources

• Increase insight into access and use of internal information

• Remove the need for employees to use their mailboxes as information stores

Introduction:

This Hedge Fund was looking to improve accessibility to information from various systems and across formats to employees, while reducing the usage of Exchange mailboxes for storing of data. All documents were being stored on a network drive, with access and changes not being audited. Furthermore, related information on different mediums (particularly email), was effectively inaccessible by other employees and in practice lost once the employee left the organisation.

Challenge:

Most organisations, and particularly Financial Service Institutions, have user mailbox sizes in gigabytes. These emails have important information that could be useful to other team members and are inaccessible. There is an expense related to this, in time and productivity, while it also forces the business to spend large sums of money keeping their Exchange server responsive. When the employee moves on, that information effectively is lost, while it may reside on some offsite backup, it is effectively hidden and not easily referenced.

Key processes related information is stored on a variety of mediums and formats, so for example research can exist in the shape of a PDF on the network drive, a excel spreadsheet with calculations and emails containing relevant information. The challenge is to make that data accessible in a central location, to enable team members to effectively find and utilise that information regardless of where it originated from or the location it resided.

Solution:

As the manner of communication and sharing of data continues to evolve, so must the methods and systems that are used in order to manage that valuable information. This forward-thinking hedge fund realise that in order to improve productivity and utilise their valuable information to maintain their  competitive edge they needed to implement an enriched information management system.

Benefits:

Roll-out of the system has been completed ahead of schedule and on budget, users have taken to it with surprising ease, information has been enriched to provide additional value and email server storage has been reduced by just under a terabyte of data, which has improved the performance of outlook.

Client Quote:

“The amount of usable information seems to be pouring out of nooks and crannies with the sharing of this information taken to a new level, the major advantage from our perspective is the continuity of the data and the traceability of who is doing what with our valuable and sensitive data."

 – Miles, CTO

3 Tips for Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

3 Tips for Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

Introduction

Cloud computing has transformed the IT landscape, public cloud offerings can help businesses reduce costs and increase business agility. These cloud services offer enormous economic benefits but they also pose significant potential risks for enterprises that must protect corporate data while complying with industry and government regulations. The purpose of this article to help enterprises make pragmatic decisions about specific issues that should be identified before selecting a hosting provider.

Data Centre

To me this is the biggest issue, the industry leaders will have their own state-of-the-art data centres and they will be geographically spread out to help reduce risk. That is not to say that there aren't some excellent vendors out there that use other data centres, yet still provide a world class support service, but as a rule of thumb I prefer vendors to have their own data centres and a few of them. I would also visit the data centres before making a decision and see how secure are they, what is your general feel about the place.

Outages

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. All vendors like to claim 99.9 % of uptime, but 80% of stats are made up. Joking. The truth though is often different because everyone naturally has selection criteria of what counts as an outage, completely understandable, so speak to existing clients and see what they say about how many times the vendor hosted systems were down over the previous year and for how long.

Platform

Most vendors that we have dealt with run on VMware, but there are some that use other systems, whether mainstream or proprietary, it is important to know which virtualisation software they use. Again, call me boring, but I prefer VMware, not only is it tried and tested, but should you ever want to leave, it's a relatively simple process. Should you choose a vendor with different virtualisation software to the vendor you are moving to it will be no simple matter.

George Toursoulopoulos is a financial technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke financial services software solutions.