McFadyen Solutions eBusiness Methodology

McFadyen's eBusiness methodology provides a framework that unites the vision of our team and ensures the flawless delivery of our services. It focuses on four key dimensions of our business:

People

The cornerstone of McFadyen Solutions is our technical expertise. We have built highly efficient eBusiness teams, which deliver exceptional value to our customers by leveraging expertise and team synergy gained on multiple projects. These efficiencies are further leveraged by our commitment to a set of core technologies, namely ATG and Interwoven.

• Strategy Consultant
Works with corporate executives to translate business goals into implementation strategies. Supports strategic decision making by negotiating tradeoffs between desired functionality, timeframe, budget, and technical risk. Proposes technical solutions and architectures, and creates high-level project plans for the implementation.

• Project Manager
Oversees the daily schedules and ensures timeliness and quality of the project deliverables. Manages relationships with project stakeholders, communicates project status and issues.

• Technical Lead
Organizes and oversees the work of the project team. Ensures the quality of all key deliverables. Establishes project infrastructure and maintains code repositories. Coordinates integration and testing efforts.

• Architect
Responsible for technical design of the solution and its key characteristics like performance, security, reliability, flexibility, and ease of integration.

• Visual Designer
Designs the visual dimension of the solution with a focus on better user experience. Ensures that design is appropriate for the target audience and effectively satisfies business requirements.

• Application Developer
Designs and develops components of the solution including server-side code, data repositories and databases, web pages, client-side scripts, etc.

• QA Specialist
Validates the quality of the solutions delivered and that they meet the requirements and designs specified earlier. Rational TestManager and Robot are leveraged to automate the testing process.

Process

The process is the crucial part of our methodology, which unites all other elements and enables timely delivery of a high-quality product.

We believe in an intelligent application of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to the area of our focus: building scalable eBusiness applications. McFadyen has adopted the enterprise development toolset from Rational and is committed to consistent use of Rational methods and tools on all our projects.

While adopting the foundation methodology and best practices from RUP, we have designed our process to meet the specifics of our business, with special consideration on the following factors:

• Support for solution development on the ATG eBusiness platform and incorporation of our
  extensive experience in ATG implementations;
• Ability to develop rapidly and gain advantage from previous ATG projects;
• Integration of the process into the customer's environment, teams, and processes;
• Support for each of our service lines, which span the strategic, technical and creative disciplines.

Our approach for managing client engagements integrates business strategy, technology, and creative design services. The process is a comprehensive method of translating our clients' business goals into a quality solution. It emphasizes an iterative development cycle with multiple incremental releases to incorporate user feedback and to keep pace with the Internet's ongoing technological changes. Iterations are always composed of a sequence of four phases:

• Inception phase - specifying the end-product vision and its business case, defining the scope of the project.

• Elaboration phase - planning the necessary activities and required resources; specifying the features, and designing the architecture.

• Construction phase - building the product, evolving the vision, the architecture, and the plans until the product is ready for a first delivery to its users.

• Transition phase - finishing the transition of the product to its users, which includes manufacturing, delivering, training, supporting, and maintaining the product until the users are satisfied.

The way each phase is realized on a particular client engagement depends on many factors, including project scope and timeframe, level of understanding of business and technical requirements, and risk tolerance. Whether the project is a new build from the ground up, evolution of existing system(s), or integration of applications, we make sure that the process is optimized for the engagement. While customizing the process, we follow two rules:

a) No phase is omitted altogether, even if only minimal work is required to complete the phase;

b) No work is done without purpose, without delivering client value.

Following the vision of RUP we focus on its 6 best practices:

1. Develop iteratively to mitigate risk early in the project
2. Effectively manage requirements
3. Model visually to manage complexity
4. Use component architectures to build resilient architecture
5. Verify quality throughout the lifecycle
6. Control changes to software

Tools

As is the case with people, the right tools are critical to the quality and timely delivery of a product. Our methodology relies heavily on leading tools to support technically complex, repetitive, labor-intensive activities; to make sure our teams spend most of their time delivering customer value, i.e. making decisions and incorporating them into strategy, design, and technology.

At McFadyen Solutions we have invested in the full enterprise set of Rational products and are broadly using the following toolsets:

• Rational Requisite Pro - for requirements management

• Rational Rose - for analysis, object modeling and architecture design using UML

• Rational ClearCase - for source control and configuration management

• Rational ClearQuest - for issue tracking and management of defect resolutions

• Rational TestManager - for test management

• Rational Robot - for test execution

• Rational ProjectConsole - for an integrated overview of the project

In order to continuously improve quality and efficiency of our work we build and leverage a set of key intellectual assets including:

• Corporate standards
• Guidelines and best practices
• Reusable components and templates
• Frameworks
  

Artifacts

The final dimension of our methodology is the use of well-structured Artifacts. McFadyen’s library of artifacts is extensive. The artifacts used are based on the needs of the engagement. These include:

• Project Charter - clearly states project objectives and key stakeholders expectations. Defines business and technical strategies, roles of the parties and modes of communication on the project.

• Project Plan - outlines the execution path of a project by allocating time and resources to each project activity.

• Business Requirements - elaborated view of how the new system shall accomplish business objectives. Each business requirement gives the direction to development and serves as criteria of acceptance.

• Functional Requirements - description of how each feature of the system is meant to function, interact with users and other subsystems.

• Non-Functional Requirements - specific requirements to system’s performance, reliability, flexibility, maintainability, security, etc.

• Visual Design Specification - visual design of the solution and guidelines for maintaining design. Includes visual characteristics like: composition of pages, graphic elements, brand treatment, typography, and color palette.

• Technical Architecture Specification - identifies all functional components of the system and how do they integrate with each other and external systems. Defines all tiers of the application and communication protocols between them. Maps deployment of functional component onto hardware and network infrastructure. Defines all key interfaces and points of integration.

• User Interface Definition - specifies design of forms and pages for user interaction, including navigation through the site and error handling.

• Data Model - logical and physical database models.

• Test Plan - provides schedule for iteration builds and test execution. Gives guidelines the types of testing to perform, such as functionality testing, load testing, browser compatibility security and user acceptance testing.