Process Analysis and Improvement

The process of creating a software solution is one with many milestones. Each milestone is very important to the overall success of a software development project. If any of the milestones are not properly completed or are skipped entirely, severe and unnecessary risk is inherently introduced into the development cycle. Our team can help reduce that risk by making sure that the most important phases of the development cycle have been properly met. When there is difficulty meeting the goals of a specific phase, our team can provide valuable insight. The following describes some of the most important steps along the development path:

Requirements Specification

The requirements specification is among the first steps in a successful development cycle. It is in this phase that a team identifies the need for a given product. In so doing, the group will enumerate the requirements of the software. Enumeration of requirements directly relates to what will be considered an acceptable product at the end of the development cycle.

While the above description sounds simple, it has been shown that correctly producing a software requirements specification (SRS) is one of the more difficult tasks in software development. The reasons are numerous, but two highly prevalent problems include effective communication within development teams, as well as the ambiguities that can arise in trying to describe the functionality of a software application. As a result of these problems, the requirement specification is often given a cursory pass. In the end, this can prove to be a project's undoing.

Let our team provide you with the proper guidance to create or improve your requirements. Since the requirements feed directly into the design specifications, the better the requirements, the better the design.

Design Specification

The design of the software is nestled between the requirements and the writing of the code. Before a code editor is opened, a developer must have a clear concept of what they will be developing. If the project is medium to large in scope, the design specification may detail a list of code modules. These modules may be expected to communicate with each other. This communication mechanism should be part of the design specification (specifically the interfaces between components). If certain modules require special functionality (compression for example), the algorithms to be used should be included in the design. Thus, the design specification must encompass enough information to allow developers to move forward on a clear path to creating the right code.

Our team has strong experience in analyzing software requirements specifications and creating complimentary design specifications.

Code Review

In many aspects, developing software can require creative or innovative solutions to problems. In some cases, a developer may have a strong background in one area of software engineering but lack skills in another. Or perhaps a given developer has spent many hours staring at the same code wondering why it is misbehaving. These are all normal problems in any good software development team. We can help provide a solution to break through the wall of problems.

Our team can take an existing set of source code and perform a line-by-line, function-by-function and object-by-object analysis. We have provided customers with invaluable information, which allowed them to proceed with a stalled project. Code reviews are quick (relative to the size of the code base, of course) and most cost effective. The end result is that more problems can be identified even before the code arrives in the test lab. This saves an enormous amount of time and money during the development cycle.

Performance Analysis

Once a software application or driver has been completed, it is tested for functional correctness. This is clearly very important. Secondarily upon completion is the ability of the software to perform at a reasonable speed on various platforms and in several environments. This point is often ignored in order to simply get the product to market. Subsequently, customers will turn back to the software developer with the complaint that reasonable performance has not been achieved. So how does one properly measure the performance of a piece of software and derive appropriate expectations? This is not a simple question with a simple answer.

Members of our team have devoted years to the analysis of software from overall code analysis to physical hardware calculations. We can identify problems within a code base and attack them resulting in surprisingly strong improvements in the speed at which the software can perform.