News 2011

November/December
TUM Graduation Ceremony We supported the Graduation Ceremony for Informatics at the Technical University Munich with the prize "Meister Coder" for the best Bachelor Thesis and donated a MacBook Air.
Broker Portal Relaunch We assisted a German insurance company with the migration and implementation of its broker portal. Thereby, some of the existing applications were migrated to portlets and also new portlets with the functionality from various of the long standing applications were newly implemented. Basis of the new platform was the IBM Websphere portal server. Especially challenging was the optimization of the performance of the data import and database according to the requirements of the business departments.
WITA-Implementation We supported a medium-sized telecommunications carrier with the implementation of the order interface WITA (OSS v4.00) from Deutsche Telekom AG in order to book new access lines. By parallel operating the old ESAA-interface and the newly implemented WITA-OSS, we could gather valuable experiences with the behaviour of the new interface and embed the necessary administrative tools to adjust for non interface-conform behaviour. Thus we were able to activate almost all business cases on the first productive day of the new system. All further business cases supported by Deutsche Telekom were taken live within the first week without any restrictions. Thereby, our customer could reduce its costs and cycle times, as well as improve the monitoring significantly, as old fax- and semi-automated processes were replaced. During the whole implementation we profited by our high testing coverage and automation of deployment.
Launch large-scale Scrum Project The large-scale scrum project of an automotive company that we have been supporting right from the start for more than one year was taken into production. Since then, almost no problems have occured, so that the teams did not even need the time that was planned for the support. During the whole project, we have supported the customer beginning as Scrum-Coach, following ScrumMaster and latest in the role of the ProductOwner.
C-Analysis For one of our customers we analyzed an application written in C, which had been growing too big to be operated by Purify. We introduced the tools librtc, dmalloc and gdb-leaks as alternatives for dynamic analysis. Additionally, we recommended using cppcheck and Cadvise for static analysis. Furthermore, we identified some aspects the customer should pay attention to during the planned migration from HP-UX to Linux.
Perl | JavaScript For the department of an insurance company, which is in charge for the asset extrapolation, we developed a tool that can be used to compare the results of distinct quarters. The challenge thereby lay in the huge amount of data. In order to compare the many ASCII-files with each other in a clever way, we used Perl. For displaying the differences, we applied JavaScript, so that dynamic filters could be set and components could be faded in and out.
Hi-Performance MySQL After switching a Perl/MySQL application to parallel processing via PVM and database tuning, we accomplished 80.000 database queries per second on a MySQL server (no benchmark, but real application queries) and thus clearly exceeded the requirements of our customer. The server of the database uses SSDs as storage medium.
September/October
svnfiltereddump On GitHub, one of our employees published an open-source tool for reorganisation of repositories from the version control system Subversion. The tool is based on the experiences we gained during a big subversion migration at one of our clients.
Lecturing We supported the Munich University of Applied Sciences with lectures during the Software Engineering II course in the winter term 2011/2012. The four topics dealt with in presentations are agile testing, code review and clean code, software projects in real life and continuous delivery.
TDD | Swing | FEST For one of our customers we conducted workshops on the topics of test-driven development and test automation. Therefore, all relevant tests for the customer's products were taken into account, i.e. unit-tests, mock-tests, integration tests with database and application server, respectively, GUI-tests for the Java Swing GUI and end-to-end tests. Through these workshops, we introduced open-source tools as well as basic software and solutions that have been selected and developed during the process we supported for the customer. They also shall be the foundation for our customer's future development. Particularly the latest JUnit 4 extensions were applied, namely rules, theories and categories. We also employed the GUI-test framework FEST with great success.
TDD | .NET We organized a two-day workshop for the developers of one of our customers, a leading provider of procurement software working with .NET technology. Together we worked directly on their code base and showed them concepts like test-driven development, mocking, dependency injection and continuous integration. We pointed out the different types of tests and what role they play in the overall testing strategy. We also brought business and developers together and explained behavior-driven development, which could be a foundation for a closer collaboration.
Sales Forecast Tool We supported one of our customers with the first implementation and further enhancement of the company-wide adopted sales forecast- and -planning tool. Development is accomplished in agile sprints lasting for two weeks. Technologies used were ETL and the statistic analysis software SAS. Data interpretation was carried out using MS Excel and SAS MS Office Add-in.
Enhancements of a Content Management System Together with another service provider we overtook the stabilization and enhancements of a content management system for a customer from the manufacturing trade. With the project set-up, agile development processes have been introduced to provide flexible steering mechanisms to our our customer, without the need to finalize demands at the project's beginning.
July/August
ElasticSearch For an e-commerce platform we integrated the web search ElasticSearch into Apache OFBiz in collaboration with developers of the customer and thus replaced the former search that was based on Bobo and Zoie. In addition to realtime updates of the search index for changed data we developed a mechanism for zero downtime reindexing to be able to optimise the search parameters during live operations. The search strategies were tailored to the customer data and optimised with search words, which we extracted from log files of the former platform.
Architecture Review For a customer in the telecommunication sector we conducted a four-week architecture and code review of the IT stack of a business segment, that activates about one third of the customers. The system comprised different Java applications integrated by EJB and JMS technologies. As result we made several recommendations for improving the stability, the overall architecture, and the code quality.
WITA Compliance Test We supported a medium-sized telecommunication carrier to fulfill the requirements of the compliance test for the order interface of the Deutsche Telekom AG. Due to the high test coverage and the automated deployment the test ran smoothly and within very short time.
Automatic Mailing We supported a customer in switching from a semi-automatic mailing process to a fully automated system. PDF files are generated based on user templates using Apache FOP. Furthermore, the processing chain integrates a printing service provider and a digital document archive. The new system generates over two thousand letters per day with an error rate that is reduced by 90%.
Introduction of new Financial Administration Software We supported a provider of an internationally used financial administration software during the go live phase of the introduction of their product in the headquarters of a multinational company. The software consists of engines written in Java, which communicate through events; this leads to to a good scalability by distribution to additional servers. We assisted with searching and solving defects and extended the reporting features. Despite the late project phase we introduced continuous integration. Thus defects in the customer specific code got immediately visible and could be fixed soon, so that valuable development time was saved in this critical project phase.
May/June
Big Techday 4 For the fourth time, TNG organised the Big Techday. About 365 visitors experienced a day full of technically interesting talks from industry and research, amongst others about the Stuxnet worm and about aircraft avatars.
VOIP in the Cloud For an enterprise customer in the telecommunications sector we developed an ExtJS-web application for managing a new, cloud-based communication solution. We implemented the application within very short time with two interacting Scrum teams consisting of up to twelve TNG consultants. In addition, we supported the business process analysis and the agile requirements engineering in an advisory capacity.
Rich Client At a customer we introduced agile methods via a pilot project, in which the methodological focus was put on Scrum and test driven development. The business goal of the project, for which we provided the Scrum Master and most developers, was to further develop an existing Java Swing rich client application.
Business Intelligence In the course of the agile enhancements of the BI landscape of a B2B mail order company we successfully integrated the data from the central planning tool of the controlling department. Thus our customer was able to generate automated reports about planned and actual sales volumes for the first time.
Post-Merger Business Analytics We supported a customer integrating his own customer and sales data from new business sectors that he had gained by a merger. Our focus was to extend existing planning and reporting applications. The further development was conducted with agile methods in two-week sprints.
Troubleshooting | Requirements Analysis | Vendor Management We supported a customer in the telecommunication sector by resolving production problems. By preparing technical requirements documents, patches for currently occurring defects could be commissioned. By connecting the planning tool of the department to the corporate bug tracking and version control systems as well as by rewriting the vendor management plan the defect handling was improved.
Security Audit | Hardening TNG accomplished a security audit of the frontend systems of a large client for several weeks. By on-site security checks, vulnerabilities of the systems were identified and potential security risks analysed. We accompanied our client during the implementation of measures to increase and then to sustain the security level.
Lectures A group of TNG colleagues gave a lecture course at Hochschule Augsburg on agile software development. Talks and tutorials on topics such as agile testing, continuous integration and deployment, agile requirements engineering, and agile process models were given by domain experts.
Continuous Integration On the occasion of a visit of a member of the Jenkins Interim Governance Board, TNG organised a CI gathering followed by a hackathon. The 20 guests heard talks by Jenkins committers, amongst others the developer of the Static Analysis Plugins. They then worked together on new plugins. In the end the foundations for two new plugins were developed, which now have to get the final polishing.
March/April
SQL Optimisation For a new customer from the automotive sector we analysed a very complex, historically grown SQL query, which influenced the performance of a customer application significantly. We identified general improvement options and supported at particular optimisation steps.
Community We supported the community by providing conference rooms for certain events. So regularly the GI Practice Group Requirements took place at our office and recently the JavaScript User Group as well as the Scrumtisch.
Jira Plugin For the IT department of a bank we developed a JIRA reporting plugin, that determined the progress and performance of the IT projects and teams that are managed with JIRA. Issues, working times or events within a certain time frame were evaluated and the results were grouped and sorted in the reports. Already in December 2010 we implemented five JIRA reports which were used by the customer from the beginning of the year on. In the meantime we implemented six further reports. Until the end of the year the plugin shall offer approximately 25 reports.
January/February
Ten Years of TNG Ten years ago, on January 10th, 2001, TNG was registered at the Commercial Registry in Munich, and has been growing each year ever since. At this point we'd like to cordially thank all our employees and customers, without whom this success story would have never happened.
Data Migration | Telecommunication | Agile Methods | Test Infrastructure After the successful data migration last year we completed the consolidation of the CRM applications to a single application stack at a medium-size telecommunication carrier by a last, even more comprehensive migration of CRM data. TNG provided a large part of the project team and the project manager. Having automated the creation of test environments for three applications, we developed a complex "big bang" migration, which was executed in a test environment every night to reduce the risk. By using agile methods consistently we could integrate newly detected tasks easily into the development process. The close collaboration with the affected business departments ensures their acceptance and is essential for handling the high complexity of the project.
Wicket | JEE For a customer in the franchise gastronomy sector we integrated the modern, component-oriented Apache Wicket framework into an existing Apache Struts/Common Controls web application. In parallel we implemented and extended some workflows for supporting the product marketing and supply department processes.
JMX Monitoring For a customer in the telecommunication sector we created a generic connection of Java JMX to the internal monitoring system of the heterogeneous infrastructure in the data center with over 70 servers.
Team Calendar This year we produced a team calendar besides our wall calendar. This team calendar eases the planning especially for agile teams. If you want to give it a try, write a short e-mail to info@tngtech.com and we gladly send it to you while supplies last.
BI Roll-out | Scrum Based on our assessment of the Business Intelligence landscape of a pan-European B2B mail order company we supported implementing the proposed BI strategy with Scrum. After TNG had carried out workshops with the relevant departments they started to write requirements in the form of user stories and prioritized them centrally. The resulting development of the data warehouse running on Microsoft SQL Server was conducted by TNG with an agile development team in 14-day-sprints. We attached great importance to the business department defining detailed acceptance criteria and verifying them at the end of the sprint. Thereby a company-wide consistent view on the valuation of the relevant business processes became possible.
BI Data Security Concept We supported a telecommunication provider in preparing a concept for protecting personal data from uncommitted analysis. The concept was derived from the privacy policy of the corporate group. It concretely described the policy compliant analysis of customer data from the data warehouse using SAS.