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Software and Business Services

In the early 1990s, software development methods and the computing architectures used to deploy software in large organizations changed dramatically. Object-oriented software development and client-server computing architectures emerged as disruptive technologies requiring a dramatic shift in how software was built and deployed. Distributed component technologies like CORBA, Network OLE/DCOM, RMI-IIOP and Enterprise Java Beans also were emerging as disruptive component deployment technologies.

Austin Software Foundry was an early evangelist for these new methods and technologies. Many of its clients have been other technology and management consulting firms, software companies, large law firms, advertising agencies and other professional service firms seeking to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors by learning these new approaches to solving technology problems.

Austin Software Foundry has offered its Business Services and Software Company clients the following:

Commercial Product Development

Austin Software Foundry has partnered with commercial software development companies to create add-on or ancillary software components to augment or enhance existing software products. For example, in 1995, ASF teamed with Dazel Corp. to create an output management component, PowerOutput, allowing developers to quickly plug Dazel Output Management services (now called HP Output Management Solutions) into PowerBuilder applications.

Professional Education and Training

Throughout the '90s, Austin Software Foundry maintained public training facilities in Austin, Houston and San Antonio. Its course curriculum consisted of ASF's own proprietary courseware, as well as licensed training classes from its partner companies: Enterprise Technology Institute International (ETI), Sybase, Powersoft and Rational Software. Many of ASF's technology and management consulting, software, legal, advertising and other professional service clients have been frequent attendees at ASF training events.

ASF also has developed original courseware for use by these clients with their development teams or for delivery through their partner networks.

Technology Assessment and Software Development Process Improvement

Austin Software Foundry's process quickly identifies risks and opportunities for improvement in clients' software development projects. 

ASF's assessment begins with a review of key project information, including:

• high-level technical and architectural designs;
• vendor-supplied technology and standards;
• internal development standards and procedures;
• structure and capabilities of the software development team; and
• existing project plans and risk assessments.

Two risk profiles are generated -- a project profile and a team profile.

The Project Profile measures the project's inherent risk across six dimensions: 

• complexity of the problem domain;
• relative experience level of the end-users in the problem domain;
• required performance levels and reliability of the delivered system;
• development and deployment technologies chosen to build and deploy the system;
• development and implementation team experience with the chosen technologies; and
• development and deployment processes used by the development and implementation teams.

The Team Profile, using ASF's Environmental Readiness Assessment tool, measures the maturity of the project team across two dimensions: 1) communication and collaboration; and 2) familiarity of the team with the underlying technologies and development approaches being used to develop the system.

These two profiles then are used to rate a team's ability to succeed. The ratings are grouped into four levels. Level I represents an appropriate Team Profile for a project with a relatively low Project Profile score (3.0 or below). Levels II through IV represent increasing levels of software development maturity; appropriate for increasingly complex projects.

Process and Project Mentoring

Austin Software Foundry's core mission is helping software professionals and their develoment teams adopt object-oriented software development technologies, techniques and processes. ASF has served its Business Services and Software Company clients in many capacities; helping their project managers, architects and developers with:

• object-oriented modeling using Coad-Yourdon, Wirfs-Brock CRC, Objectory, Booch, OMT and Rational UML;
• creation and review of object-oriented designs;
• creation and review of object-oriented code;
• management of object-oriented, rapid development processes;
• development of best practices for object-oriented development and project management; and
• creation of organization and language-specific, object-oriented programming style guides.

In addition, we have mentored Directors of Application Development, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Information Officers and other senior managers responsible for introducing object-oriented and component technology to their organizations.