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Energy

Austin Software Foundry has engaged with oil and gas and energy sector clients throughout its history. After all, in Texas, it's hard to avoid the "oil patch." Here are a few examples:

Component and Framework Development

A Fortune 500 gas and electric utility company hired Austin Software Foundry to provide a customized version of its AdAPT base class library and to create a customized version of its Process Management for Object-Oriented Development course for use throughout its application development organization.

Technology Assessment and Software Development Process Improvement

Austin Software Foundry uses its assessments to help major oil and gas companies identify risks, as well as opportunities for improvement, in their software development projects. For example:One of the largest oil companies in the world hired ASF to evaluate one of its projects. The company's research and development division had ASF conduct a full assessement of a project to create the next generation of its reservoir simulation system. 

ASF's assessment process 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.

The Assessment generates two risk profiles. The first is a Project Profile that measures the inherent risk of the project across the following 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 second risk profile produced is a Team Profile, using ASF's Environmental Readiness Assessment tool. It 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

ASF helps many of its energy clients' 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.