Investment Bank
During 1996/7 Dan Haywood (now of Haywood Associates Ltd.) was the project manager for a 12 month long project developing a credit risk application for an investment bank. This built on from a previous phase that had been conducted under fixed price contract which had delivered two releases 6 months apart. This second phase was conducted under T&M, but with the new requirement of much more regular releases.
Although this project predates the agile development terminology that is nowadays in vogue, nevertheless the same principles were used:
- a robust configuration management tool was selected and the existing codebase migrated over
- a new release approach was introduced with the first release shipped after 3 months, with subsequent releases monthly
- work was split out was defined to chunk out pieces of work into small increments, lasting no more than 2 developer weeks
- the functional specification was revamped so that it could be more easily maintained with respect to a specific workpackage, keeping code and documentation in sync.
- the application architecture was revamped so that the interfaces between the components were more clearly defined, allowing further parallelisation of work
- Sybase's PowerDesigner was used to reverse engineer the data model; subsequently the database schema was generated from the model (the don't repeat yourself principle)
Where the project was weak (by today's standards) was in iterative (rather than incremental) development, and in the lack of continuous integration and unit tests. Rather, traditional system testing was performed - this would usually take the last week of a 4 week cycle.
J2EE Development
Through 2001/2 Haywood Associates were engaged to continue development of a performance reporting application for an investment bank. The initial implementation had been developed in Perl against a Sybase ASE RDBMS; the new implementation was to use J2EE (servlets and JSPs), again against a Sybase backend.
TogetherJ was used to develop and document the fundamental domain model, with the conventional model 2 architecture used to lace together the servlets and JSPs. PowerDesigner was used to for all stages of RDBMS design: the logical data model, and corresponding physical data model, and then subsequently the SQL.
Since the application was to allow management to inspect relative usage levels of server loads, graphs were generated on the fly using JFreeChart open source graphing library.