News 2010

May/June
Big Techday 3 TNG organised the Big Techday for the third time. The 280 visitors heard a large number of speakers from research and industry, amongst others Prof. Dr. Martin Odersky from the ETH Lausanne on the programming language Scala and Dr. Peter Singer from the Brookings Institution on "The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century".
Bavaria's Best 50 In this year's "Bavaria's Best 50" competition, TNG was one of 50 awardees as a strongly growing company. Entrance to the competition is free of charge and open for every Bavarian mid-sized enterprise. It is conducted by an independent auditing company on behalf of the Bavarian ministry of economics. Since the rankings are based only on the weighted growth of the company's turnover and number of employees, it is reasonably objective.
Data Migration | Java-Magazine Together with a customer we published an article in the July issue of the Java-Magazine on agile approches for complex migration scenarios.
Scrum Coaching A Scrum project for re-implementing internet information services coached by us rolled out the first release for the public tests. From the start of the tests it ran without problems. The software was developed in a pure Scrum process supplemented by XP methods like test driven development (TDD) and continuous integration (CI).
Scrum | Kanban | Public Health At a service provider in the pubic health sector we accepted a new challenge in mass data processing. Due to the extremely short delivery date accompanied by time-consuming operations support we recommended to combine Scrum and Kanban as process model.
Touchscreen-Computer with UMTS For a telecommunication company and for a provider of touchscreen computers we were responsible for the technical description and their implementation in the course of connecting the computer to the UMTS net.
March/April
Business Intelligence With the Pentaho BI Suite, we supported one of our customers in the finance sector in reporting and business intelligence.
Verification We re-verified the build of a large Java and C++ application on Solaris 10. After extensive modifications of the build scripts and adaptions of the source code, the complex build finally worked.
Test Data Anonymisation For a large IT-service provider, we prepared a feasibility study for the anonymisation of test data. We evaluated possible tools, prepared a project plan for the realization, and determined the expected costs.
Project Management We supported one of our customers in completing an outsourcing project. We extended the automated acceptance tests, wrote the operations manual and organised the deployment into production.
Consulting | WITA We analysed the strategy of one of our customers concerning the WITA order management interface of Deutsche Telekom and worked out a sustainable implementation concept compliant to the new internal IT strategy.
DRBD | Cluster One of our experts set up a distributed replicated block device (DRBD) cluster including Pacemaker/OpenAIS on an evaluation system. This allows realistic testing of the migration of the production environment, a cluster with an existing Java/Tomcat/PostgreSQL web application.
Network Assessment For a customer we analysed the setup of the network infrastructure in its data center. We started with analysing potential misconfigurations in the implementation. For some known problems we were able to find the root cause and to suggest solutions or workarounds. Additionally we evaluated the network with respect to redundancy and performance and gave recommendations for further improvements.
VoIP We analysed the problems of an Asterisk VoIP server at the transition into the ISDN phone net. Next we improved the voice quality on the phones of our customer substantially by reconfiguring the Asterisk VoIP server.
Hibernate Training For a customer we gave a tailor-made two-day advanced training on the object relational mapping framework Hibernate. The topics ranged from configuration and integration into Spring over complex queries using criteria and HQL to performance tuning, caching, and testing.
Billing | Business Intelligence One of our billing specialists discovered a monthly revenue leak of 15-20 thousand Euros by running business intelligence queries on the customer's Oracle-based billing system.
January/February
Data migration | Telecommunication | CRM | Agile Methods We finished a data migration project of a telecommunication carrier with great success. The project was the largest migration in the history of our customer. TNG was responsible for the project management and staffed the majority of the project team. Core parts of our customer's CRM systems were consolidated whilst in daily use. We focused on technical issues such as how to provide continuous deployment for the testing systems, but also on process topics. The key questions were how our customer's employees could work successfully with the new systems introduced and which business processes had to be aligned. Although the project's complexity increased tremendously, we managed to finish the project on time and in budget. The critical success factors were the use of agile development processes and the introduction of modern test automation tools and methodologies.
Technology Review We supported a customer in choosing suitable frameworks, tools, and standards for defining a Java-based server platform strategy. We reviewed an existing proposal and supplemented it with references to further frameworks, tools and standards.
Process and Tool Chain Study For a customer in the insurance sector we inspected the process and tool chain for developing its mathematical core component. We identified a set of measures to reduce risk and increase efficiency, prepared a cost/benefit analysis, and gave recommendations for further actions.
Online Documentation | Scrum For a customer we prepared an online documentation for its corporate Scrum process. In order to meet the customer-specific needs we extended XWiki by some JavaScript classes and XWiki macros.
Multi-project Management We supported a customer in the telecommunication sector by planning and controlling all deliveries affecting a very complex software stack. In a team of multi-project managers we coordinated about 25 subprojects and took responsibility for the entire delivery.
Outsourcing Project Evaluation For one of our customers we evaluated a Java project, which was executed with the aid of an international outsourcing company. We evaluated the quality of the software, build system and documentation as well as the whole project setup. Based upon this review, we were able to give detailed recommendations how to get at least parts of the project into production.