News 2009

November / December
Software Verification For one of our customers we verified the build process of an extensive client-server application written in Java.
Scrum | Coaching | Training We assisted a customer from the internet domain name management sector in implementing Scrum for a development project. We coached the management, the stakeholders, the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the Scrum team as well as the project team.
Moreover, on December 14th and 15th, 2009 another public Certified Scrum Master Training took place at the TNG premises.
Telecommunication Service Management The platform for service management of broad band data networks (DSL, UMTS) developed by us was extended substantially. We took responsibility for the whole project life cycle, including requirements analysis, software development, testing, and deployment. The new features result in cost savings and improvements of customer service. Now customer service processes can be optimised. Disruptions can be detected early by means of drastically enhanced transparency in the network.
Data Center Relocation We supported a financial service provider by relocating its data center without interrupting operations. The hard- and software of the whole technology stack was updated simultaneously. The new infrastructure does not only provide substantially better performance and reliability, but also an optimal utilization of the hardware due to virtualisation. An extensive monitoring and performance management was introduced as well as automatic configuration management and deployment.
Java | Data Farming For one of our customers we reimplemented an application for managing a data farm of simulation models. We redesigned and unified the interfaces of the appliction for fetching the descriptions of the simulation experiments and for returning the processed results to the connected systems.
Maintenance | Telecommunication After our successful refactoring of an existing software integration environment in the telecommunication industry, we took over the further maintanenance and development of this huge system.
September / October
Change Management | JIRA We supported a customer's IT department improving their change management process. We refined requirements in several workshops and realised a software solution prototype based on the JIRA issue tracker. After the customer's acquisition decision, we implemented the necessary customizations and put JIRA into production. We also trained all end users and gave operational support during the introductory phase.
Scrum On September 10th and 11th, 2009 a Certified Scrum Master Training took place in TNG's office, complemented by a talk about "Real-Life Scrum" by one of our experts.
On September 10th, 2009 we invited customers to an event "Scrum - Theory and Practice". Our consultants gave insights on agile development methods and practical hints.
TNG was main sponsor of the event House of Open Scrum on October 7th, 2009. Two of our experts presented TNG's best practices in putting agile development methods into place in a talk called Scrum in der Praxis.
Java | Public Health We supported a customer extending their Java enterprise application for auditing. Within this project we showed our customers how to use a Scrum development process and thus helped our customer introducing Scrum to their development department.
Partner University TNG is now a member of the Supporters Club of the Cambridge University Computing Lab and of the Corporate Partnership Programmes of the Computing Department at the Imperial College at London University. TNG is offering internships for students of these renowned institutes.
Integration | Telecommunication We supported a customer with a telecommunication background integrating three new partners into an existing software system by providing the bigger part of the integration team. In addition, we implemented a web shop for preordering for one of the partners. The web shop is using Java, Tapestry 5, Axis 1.4, SOAP, Apache and Tomcat. The project was finished on time despite an extremely tight schedule.
Refactoring For a customer with a telecommunication background we refactored an existing integration platform developed in-house.
Also, the business intelligence application of another customer was refactored incrementally. More than 100 dialogs were redesigned from scratch. In addition, existing JavaScript code was refactored to make use of the jQuery framework. We optimized the performance of asynchronous loading of JavaScript and of images using CSS sprites. The changes increased site loading velocity threefold and reduce the lines of code by up to 75%.
July / August
Business Intelligence We supported a customer's business intelligence department with the development of analyses that prepare and evaluate strategic corporate decisions. The requirements of each analysis were specified, reports using the data warehouse were created, the results were verified and presented in management reports. We put a particular focus on the reusability of the newly generated reports.
Data migration | Telecommunication | CRM | Agile Methods We took responsibility for a data migration project of one of our customers in the telecommunication industry. We took over the project management and the bigger part of the implementation team. The business goal of the project was the consolidation of essential parts of our customer's CRM systems without interrupting operations. Within we introduced agile development processes and tools and thus helped our customer's IT department with new ideas.
Data Warehouse | Testing We augmented a project within a customer's data warehouse with a test expert and a scrum coach. We created a test concept allowing our customer to validate the correctness of reports without using live production data, for the the first time . Applying the inspect and adapt principle systematically, our customer increased his team velocity fourfold during the project.
Jira | Workflow We supported a customer's internal IT department introducing a new issue/bug tracking system, Atlassian Jira. The system got deployed for the whole company. We supported with basic installation and configuration tasks, gathered requirements for several pilot projects, specified and aligned the required workflows in collaboration with stakeholders and help configuring Jira. The system was a great success with end users: Within a few weeks more than a thousand tickets were processed in the system.
SSO For a new customer we took over new tasks in the area of single-sign-on (SSO). We clarified the SSO requirements in close collaboration with our client, listed boundary conditions and evaluated various products. In addition, we set up an initial planning for the integration of more than 20 existing applications in the to-be-created SSO system.
User tests | Usability analysis We developed a jQuery-based framework for the analysis of a core navigation element of a customer's web page. We measured the user performance of HTML and Flex prototypes. In the user tests we compared two alternatives to the existing solution for multiple use cases. The results gave new ideas on how to combine the users' desires in an ideal fashion.
SQL Workshop For one of our customers we conducted a two-day SQL workshop. We put a special focus on teaching basics and interactive exercises on executing simple to complex database queries. In addition, we talked about database essentials, transactions, an introduction to tools and an overview of simple DDL commands. During the workshop we used the MySQL database, but also considered Oracle specifics.
Perl Workshop For one of our customers we conducted a two-day practical Perl workshop for advanced developers. We put a special focus on getting to know a broad range of Perl Modules (e.g. CPAN, XML::Twig, DBI, Net::SFTP::Foreign, Log::Log4perl, Config::General, autodie, Test::*, etc.). We analysed existing frameworks of our customer and discussed best practices.
Mobile Internet For one of our customers we conducted a workshop on the topic of Mobile Internet. We informed the participants on the history of the mobile Internet, how to develop content for mobile devices, how to optimise forms used in mobile contexts, how to increase the performance of web sites, and mobile analytics. Finally, we concluded the workshop with user tests of mobile applications.
Partner University The Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS), University of Southampton, is working in the area of numerical simulation and the analysis of complex systems. The institue has its roots in a research programme of the British government and aims at connecting university research with industry projects. TNG is the latest industrial partner of the institute and offers internships for students of the institute.
Scrum | CSM | Training On July 13th and 14th, 2009 a public Certified Scrum Master Training took place in TNG's office. Again, the training was held by Boris Golger.
May / June
Rule Engine We supported one of our customers from the insurance sector with using a rule engine for validating insurance applications. Our client planned to automate tests, which have been carried out only by clerks until now. We provided advice for writing the rules and built a prototype based on the open-source rule engine Drools. The client decided to introduce the technology based on its experience with the prototype.
Java | Franchise | Logistics For a gastronomy and franchise company, we implemented several adjustments and enhancements in its IT landscape. We adapted an application for master data management to the new German packaging rules and implemented an additional optimisation method for an automatic ordering system. Moreover, we switched the whole web application landscape to UTF-8 and optimised the software development process via a Python-based database import/export script.
Code Verification For one of our clients we evaluated a Windows application written in C++ and C# regarding the transparency of the described build process. Moreover we looked at the structure of the source-code, the comments in it and the available documentation and estimated the time a developer not familiar with the project would need to be able to start with further development of the application.
Scrum | CSM | Training On May 27th and 28th, 2009 a public "Certified Scrum Master Training" took place in TNG's office. As in January 2009 the training was held by Boris Gloger, the first certified Scrum Trainer in Europe and author of the book "Scrum. Produkte zuverlässig und schnell entwickeln". This time an additional "Scrum cooking" Event was offered, so that the participants had a chance to deepen their knowledge while cooking together.
March / April
Project Management We took responsibility for another sub-project within the insurance company we are supporting since February. The new project had high visibility as it dealt with processes and software at our client's sales partner. We supported our client during requirements engineering and coordinated multiple stakeholders - business and development departments and suppliers -, and helped synchronising the sales partner and its suppliers.
Workshop | Java | Tomcat We conducted a training for a client's operations staff. The training dealt with Java basics, Apache httpd and Tomcat setups, the Java memory model, threading, garbage collection and tool-supported monitoring of Java applications. Using a demo application running in an virtual machine, typical scenarios were simulated and discussed in an realistic environment.
Apache | Cluster We stabilised a production cluster running Apache httpd and Tomcat. Before our efforts, the applications had to be restarted weekly due to connection leaks. We detected and fixed the root cause via analysing existing data and implementing additional monitoring facilities.
Usability We evaluated the usability of a client's analysis application via end user interviews. We identified possible starting points for improvement and helped our client in finding ways to roll out software with increased usability in a short time frame.
Monitoring | Billing We designed and implemented a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring system for billing applications. We employed the open source monitoring system Nagios, the programming language Perl and Oracle databases.
Code Verification We analysed a huge legacy application for the creation and the management of digital certificates. We had a look at the source code quality and forecasted the complexity of functional extensions. We used - amongst others - static code analysers for the analysis of Java and C++ source code and manual inspections. We gave detailed feedback to the application's user regarding possible weaknesses and future improvement possibilities.
Scrum | Java At Scrum Day 2009 in Munich, we gave a talk on "Effective tool application in the Java Environment".
ISTQB Certified Tester One of our experts got certified as ISTQB Certified Tester. This allows us to provide standardised knowledge on test planning, management, design and implementation for client projects.
January / February
Project Management For an insurance company we took over the partial project leadership for a strategic project, the automation of the insurance application process. The goal is to develop the IT systems towards SOA. For this several client departments had to be coordinated and supported in the negotiation process with distributors and with respect to the overall solution finding. The solution comprises several heterogenous backend systems, automated data transfer and complex validations.
Code Review We inspected and evaluated a CRM application of one of our clients regarding code quality, simplicity of builds, the necessary project setup and potential possibilities for improvement. The review is completed within a week.
SSO After the preliminary work of another service provider we took an integrated authentification and authorisation system based on Kerberos/OpenLDAP with "single sign on" (SSO) functionality live. The work was done on a step by step basis in multiple datacenters of one of our clients. The switch was carried out on all production systems without any problems.
DBA We accepted new responsibilities in the area of database administration and environment support at one of our customers.
MediationZone | Training The majority of our Mediation expert team got a training from two DigitalRoute trainers about integration options in the Java based mediation framework MediationZone®. In a few days we extended the base product with a JRuby node. It allows the implementation of mediation logic in JRuby instead of using the proprietary configuration language APL.
DSL We developed a system which analyses and monitors the realtime service quality of the broadband access network (DSL) of a carrier. Network problems can be identified via statistical parameters and be analysed down to a single customer. Besides error analysis and SLA monitoring, the system provides load data for network planning purposes. The technology stack consists of Linux, Perl, Tomcat and Grails. The whole project was realised within four months and is currently used by the network operations and customer service departments.
Confluence Extractor Plugin We extended an open source Mindmap Extractor plugin for Confluence. Besides an enhanced support for FreeMind mindmaps the new version supports the XMind and MindManager file formats, so that content is indexed for the Confluence search.
Scrum | CSM | CSPO | Training In January, a public "Certified Scrum Master Training" took place in TNG's office. It was succeed by a "Certified Scrum Product Owner Training". The training session was held by Boris Gloger, the first certified scrum trainer from Europe and author of the book "Scrum. Produkte zuverlässig und schnell entwickeln". Overall there are now 36 Certified Scrum Masters (CSM) at TNG, 11 of which are also Certified Scrum Product Owners (CSPO).
Talk | Java | Scrum Our employees gave a talk at the Java User Group Munich about "Java Development with Scrum". We presented tools and methods, spoke about best practices and passed on our experience from real projects. Due to an enormous interest from our clients, we repeated the talk in our office some weeks later.