In response to rapidly changing market conditions and business needs, your software development team has probably worked very hard to meet aggressive schedules and changing requirements. These accomplishments have enabled your business with competitive assets, but do you know the quality and stability of the architecture upon which these assets are built?
In order to meet your aggressive goals, development teams often do not have the time needed for long-term architectural planning. While your initial deployment and early-stage production use may have indicated few problems, your long-term use and growth may be very limited.
The Architecture Assessment draws upon years of success in designing and building commercial applications in MS .NET or J2EE. Our senior analysts and engineers work with your team to document your system and provide an in-depth analysis focused on key growth-support areas including stability, scalability, application security, availability and maintainability. Through the Architecture Assessment, we also provide the detailed recommendations needed to adjust for any limitations hidden within your system.
The Architecture Assessment includes a complete spectrum of evaluations tailored to the specific needs of each client. The selection of evaluations and deliverables include:
Code Inspections
Concurrent Processing Analysis
Tiered Architecture Evaluation
Security Assessment
Risk Assessment
Compatibility/Adaptability Assessment
Fault Tolerance Evaluation
Examination for Reusability and Options for -Improvement
Performance Analysis
Database Design Evaluation
Maintainability and Interoperability Analysis
Intellectual Property Rights Review
Classification of IP
Intangible Asset Eligibility Review
Usability Assessment
Quality Assurance Assessment
Risk Assessment
Intangible Asset Eligibility Review
Business Issues Addressed
Is your current design documentation complete? How much of your design detail is lost when one of your senior engineers resigns?
Can your application handle the demands of your business now and in the future? How scalable is your application or e-business? How portable and extensible?
Are you realizing any of the promised benefits of reuse? Is your system documented sufficiently to facilitate reusability?
Can you practically migrate from a client-server model to the web or from a web browser to a hand-held device?
If your company acquires new products or technologies, how will these integrate into your current application architectures?
Is your intellectual property value being fully realized? Can you describe your intellectual property assets in sufficient detail to be patented?
Process and Deliverables
The Architecture Assessment utilizes a proven methodology based on years of commercial software engineering and migrations to evolving platforms. The process includes:
Investigation and Documentation
Using a combination of existing documentation, team interviews, code deconstruction and database examination, we document your complete system architecture.br> Analysis
Our senior analysts and engineers will analyze the documented architecture. The system will be reviewed with regard to stability, scalability, application security, availability and maintainability.
Alternative and Recommendations
Recommendations will be made to resolve issues uncovered during analysis. This may include a combination of strategic adjustments and specific actions that will improve targeted issues within your system architecture.
Benefits
Without comprehensive system documentation, what do you loose when a critical team member resigns? The Architecture Assessment protects against this loss with thorough documentation that enables other team members to quickly step in and fill the void.
The quality and completeness of design documentation often suffers when budgets and delivery dates are tight. The long-term value and extensibility of your application diminishes over time as fewer of your developers know and remember the design details and changes that occurred during the development process. An Architecture Assessment will help you capture much of the lost design information to create a thorough, current design document that supports your plans for future enhancements and migrations.
Most often, application scalability does not become an issue until practical limits are reached, in production. The Architecture Assessment provides a quantified assessment of application scalability before limits are reached. As a result of the audit, you will know the specific issues that can limit scalability and identify options for resolving each. Likewise, portability and extensibility are frequently not considered until there is a reason to move your application into a new context other than that for which it was originally created. The Architecture Assessment provides a means for identifying issues surrounding porting and extending your application, along with providing recommendations of best practices to reduce cost in these activities.
Preserving your investment in existing systems is key to cost effectively deploying an e-business, or extending your existing business. The Architecture Assessment identifies issues associated with extending your "legacy" or existing applications onto the Web, or into the wireless applications world. As with other dimensions of the analysis, the Assessment provides recommendations of best practices to minimize cost of extending your application and maximizing the value of your existing system investments.
Intellectual property can be a valuable asset to your organization. In fact, your technology may even be patent able. However, the value of intellectual property is only known if it can be assessed objectively, typically by 3rd party auditors or due diligence teams as part of M&A or other transactions. The Architecture Assessment establishes the proper baseline documentation that is a prerequisite for any such auditing process, and is likewise a prerequisite for your patent attorneys to begin a patent claim on your behalf.
And finally the PORTALiNCUBATOR Architecture Assessment can help you further define and/or refine your applications corporate, user, and quality goals.
PORTALiNCUBATOR
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