News 2010

November/December
Project Management For a large pay-TV company we provided a project manager, who centrally planned and controlled the extension of an important business process.
Functional Programming Cooperating with Scala Solutions we will hold a Scala training in our office on February 23rd and 24th, 2011. We are happy that on the second day of the training the Scala inventor, Martin Odersky, will co-chair the training personally. On the evening of February 24th, 2011, there will be a presentation on the future of Scala. Everyone who wants to participate, can register free of charge at info@tngtech.com.
Technical Due Diligence For a customer from the finance sector we conducted a technical due diligence at a company, our customer wanted to join in. In the course of the due diligence we analysed the system architecture and performance, IT security aspects, the licencing environment, and the state of the documentation. We reviewed the technical tools, that were used, and the processes for development, project handling, customer support and operations. The result enabled the customer to reach a better investment decision.
B2B Market Place Lusini, a B2B market place for hotel and gastronomy needs, went into a public beta phase. TNG was substantially responsible for the implementation of the server side in Apache OFBiz. We designed and operated a redundant production infrastructure. We integrated a new interface to a payment provider in OFBiz and reached the PCI certification of the system to be able to use credit cards.
IT Management At a customer we took over the guidance and coordination of the IT department transitionally. We took care of the infrastructure and support of employees. In addition, we supported the internal development of an online community on the basis of PHP and the Zend framework.
September/October
Portal Development We increased our portal development team at a large international insurance company and took over further tasks. In addition, our experts worked out a solution for quickly eliminate an existing security vulnerability in several web applications and advised other teams how to solve it.
Scrum Coaching We introduced Scrum at a telecommunication solutions provider. For that the management and the teams were trained. The set-up of the Scrum project and the start of the development was accompanied by us.
Kanban Coaching We advised the board of directors and the department heads of a customer in introducing and implementing Kanban. In this context we gave two introductory talks on Kanban for the employees.
Scrum Coaching We advised a department of an automotive manufacturer at introducing Enterprise Scrum in a large-scale project with several teams. We coached the first Scrum team of this project and after the success of the first two sprints, another five scrum teams were set up. Further teams shall follow in the next weeks.
Confluence Introduction We supported an insurance company in introducing the enterprise wiki Confluence. Thereby we did not only consult them, but also developed plugins and extended the JavaScript functionality to be able to support for example the quality assurance process of our customer even better. In addition, we took over the administration and operations of Confluence.
Actuary | Automation At an insurance company we increased the level of automation for the actuaries' handling of complaints, e.g. by the BaFin. Our agile approach in this one-year project resulted in a first return on invest already after four weeks, when the whole department started to use the first improvements of the process.
iPad Development For a publishing house we developed a mobile version of its successful learning software for children, that was available on PC and Mac until now. Parts of the games should be implemented first for the Apple iPad, and later for other mobile platforms such as Android.
Agile Testingdays One of our experts gave a talk at the Agile Testing Days on test driven migration of complex systems. We reported on a successfully conducted data migration project, in which we were able to control the arising risks by a combination of approaches from test driven development with big bang release scenarios.
Application Development | Agile Methods We supported a customer in the telecommunication sector in the development and requirements management of a web application based on Enterprise Java and the JavaScript framework Ext JS. For that we used our Scrum process knowledge to implement the project ideally according to the dynamic conditions, and coached the Product Owner of the customer in compiling the product backlog.
Build of a Reporting Database For a customer we built a reporting database, since the productive database was not suitable for reporting tasks. We allowed for easy handling of the new data for our customer as well as good extensibility in the case, that later a more complex data warehouse should be based on the reporting database.
July/August
OOP 2011 TNG will participate in the 20th anniversary of the OOP fair as an exhibitor at OOP 2011.
Scrum Coaching TNG won a large coaching mandate by a telecommunication company to support it in introducing Scrum and Kanban in international project teams with offshore components. In addition, we advised this company in reorganisation questions in order to advance the implementation of agile processes.
e-fellows Since several alumni of the e-fellows.net scholarship network are working successfully at TNG, we became one of the partner firms of the e-fellows organisation.
Capital Increase To enable further company growth also on the financing side, the TNG Technology Consulting GmbH increased its own funds by 240.000 Euro to now 690.000 Euro. The capital increase was completely funded out of resources generated by the ongoing business.
B2B Market Place TNG took over the whole development of a new B2B market place for a customer, who is market leader in his segment in Europe. During an extensive evaluation phase, we compared, among other systems, Apache OFBiz, Magento and Oxid. The implementation was conducted on OFBiz.
Broker Portal Migration We supported a customer from the insurance sector in migrating several web applications to portlets for a new Websphere Portal Server platform. During the realisation Scrum was consistently used.
Webservice Adapter | Payment System For a payment technologies provider we developed a SOAP webservice adapter to an existing XML transaction interface. The development mainly takes place within the agile processes of the customer and was finished significantly ahead of time.
Business Intelligence Study We analysed the business intelligence landscape of a B2B mail order company and created an assessment of the current situation, including an evaluation and medium-term BI strategy.
Agile Data Warehousing We supported a customer in the telecommunication sector with the implementation of test driven development in his data warehouse. For that we used FitNesse and particularly DB Fit. For integrating the test framework into the existing processes, we developed a light weight generator for the test documentation.
Hudson | Open Source One of our experts became committer at the open source continuous integration server Hudson. Through that we could give back experience from our projects in creating build pipelines to the open source community.
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.