Business Problem: BMC's development team needed to re-architect its aging PATROL systems management product line in 8-10 months. The new end-to-end systems management platform required the functionality to diagnose complex problems, while offering simple installation. The team also had to combine three earlier architectures (PATROL 3, PATROL 7 and PATROL Express) into one infrastructure.

Application Solution: The development team built the new BMC Performance Manager using an Agile (Scrum) software development lifecycle based on two-week iterations. Software tools for the project included the Eclipse Platform, Oracle, JBoss Application Server, JUnit regression testing framework and Maven software management tool. Project requirements were reprioritized for each iteration based on project and customer requirements. Maven helped the team, which included about 200 developers and quality assurance testers, keep track of requirements, story cards, tasks, iteration and release status. The solution architecture encapsulated cross-platform hosting components as well as a central database and Web-based portal. BMC Performance Manager provides monitoring, alert notification, event management, reporting and historical trending from a central console. A major challenge in this project was the integration of five different infrastructure components. Once integration was achieved, the last four months of the development effort were used to build and test the integrated system.
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Business Problem: Working under a federal mandate, Ohio needed to consolidate information in 88 disparate county child welfare systems so that the case files would be readily accessible to welfare workers statewide, regardless of county.

Child welfare workers in the field were unable to readily view case files for individual children in the system and determine what care they had been provided and by which county because each county employed unique or incompatible paper-based and automated systems.

Application Solution: To build a new system that would provide child welfare case workers with secure, readily available access to 120,000 active case files statewide using a Web interface.

The SACWIS development team is able to effectively manage the system’s complexity because the project is partitioned into five loosely coupled subsystems based on a service oriented architecture. The project combines the agile nature of small team development with the overall architectural control provided by a model-driven approach. Through fast prototyping of functionality and short, two-week development iterations, business users are able to rapidly verify system functionality.

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Business Problem: Traditionally, Convergys allowed its numerous development teams to select their own configuration management solutions and to develop the processes to manage their CM environments. In 2003, Convergys embarked on a plan to develop a consistent CM environment across all its projects.

Application Solution: Convergys set up a four-person Work Management Configuration Management team to select a CM tool that would be used by all its project teams. Following an internal review and evaluation, the WMCM elected to standardize Telelogic SYNERGY/CM, a tool suite for task-based change and configuration management.

Telelogic SYNERGY/CM provides task-based management of software objects, which Convergys felt was critical to successfully managing its project. In addition, Convergys created a Work Management System, an in-house tool for managing enhancement requests and trouble tickets and then created an interface between WMS and SYNERGY/CM. The WMCM team also created a Web portal for access to content about the project, documentation related to the Teleogic toolkit, scripts and other features.

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Business Problem: Digital Insight, an online banking provider for financial institutions, found itself grappling with several problems related to its application build processes. Errors in builds would go undetected long after they first appeared--sometimes as late as QA certification; detecting build errors required doing a time-consuming analysis of text files produced during the build; and gathering metrics about the build was impossible because critical information was not being saved.

Application Solution: Digital Insight decided the solution to these and other problems was to underpin its build process with software configuration management tools from BuildForge. The two products the company selected were BuildForge FullControl and FullThrottle.

FullControl captures information about software components, configurations, resources and user activities to create a complete picture of a release. Critical release information combined with software artifacts and change management processes and events enable development managers to trace source changes, defects and test suites in each release. In addition, they can quickly diagnose errors as they occur within an application in production.

FullThrottle accelerates builds by transforming idle servers into optimized build clusters, thus speeding build processing time. Large-scale deployments to server farms can be automated and executed consistently each time. The result is radical improvements in build and release times with much less effort.

The new system gives Digital Insight’s development team the ability to measure quality in more meaningful ways throughout the development cycle and it is now able to see if quality is improving or declining throughout the release.

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Business Problem: Retool a homegrown configuration management system to improve quality and project speed across all of EA’s game titles. The new system had to be non-disruptive and support dispersed development teams’ existing tools and practices.

Application Solution: EA used BuildForge FullControl and FullThrottle to build a configuration management framework to institute standardized “build” and “release” processes across development teams. The architecture features a BuildForge centralized management console on an Apache server with a resident MySQL database and an embedded execution engine, which connects other products, including existing tools, to form a process management system. The new system makes it easier for geographically dispersed teams to communicate and run common processes. Data for each build is tracked throughout the project lifecycle and tasks are automated from one stage to another.

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Business Problem: In 1999, Sun decided to build an in-house, rules engine for risk analysis. Ten Sun developers, using PERL and Java, built the system over a period of 2.5 years. As the use of the system expanded, so did its complexity, making the creation, maintenance and management of rules knowledge increasingly difficult. In addition, converting human knowledge into new rules required unique developer and program level talent to code the rules into the system.

Application Solution: Following a review of the leading business rules engine products, Sun selected Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor. The features that influenced Sun’s decision to select Blaze Advisor include its enterprise rules repository, enhanced rules metadata properties and its powerful querying capability.

Sun’s use of Blaze Advisor within its diagnostic system illustrates the power of rules in a complex customer-facing application. Blaze Advisor provides Sun with an enterprise-class Java-based solution that has been designed and customized to improve its interaction with its customers on a daily basis. This also provides a flexible framework to interact with customers for alerts across the various channels of communication.

The original system required the work of 10 Sun programmers over 2.5 years. The new system built with Blaze Advisor took seven programmers, two knowledge engineers, and two Blaze Advisor consultants 5 months to get the entire system running in production.

The core rules engine of Blaze Advisor has been faster and more efficient than the team expected. Rule creation and maintenance has been simplified and streamlined. Senior-level knowledge engineers are able to maintain complex rules packages using a built-in IDE. As expected, the non-developers have been able to use templates to make changes to the system faster, and it has allowed knowledge engineers to focus on more complex issues.

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