Software Product Development

Software Product Development

Background
Eworld Solutions Corporation is a global leader in business performance management software. Eworld provides an integrated suite of software products for financial planning, budgeting, performance management, and reporting. Along with the industry's most comprehensive and flexible set of interoperable applications, Eworld offers the leading business intelligence platform optimized to support its business performance management solutions. The Common Technology Group was formed to architect and build the underlying infrastructure platform and components to integrate all Eworld's products for seamless interoperability.

Project Objectives
The Common Technology Group at Eworld has successfully used outsourced engineering services from Eworld to help build infrastructure modules for its centralized base platform. The platform is an integral part of Eworld's product suite, making it easier for customers to install Eworld's products and use them seamlessly together.

Eworld selected Eworld to provide design, development, and testing services to the Common Technology Group.

Eworld Solution
The Common Technology Group and Eworld worked together to establish clear project goals, appropriate engineering processes for distributed product development, communications and review processes, knowledge transfer programs, and engagement rules for superior project execution. Eworld established a development and quality testing team to work with Eworld - including a segregated, secure facility in India. The project delivery was managed by Eworld under Eworld's guidance. There were periodic customer visits to the Eworld center, as well as day to day communications between the teams in the US and Eworld India.

The project included design and architecture, development, and testing. Initially, Eworld helped set priorities and requirements as well as establish the processes for developing and testing the software. Eworld's proven engineering management practices and commitment to knowledge transfer allowed the team to evolve and assume additional responsibilities. The team is fully integrated and members from both Eworld and Eworld participate in setting direction, managing the project, and resolving issues. Eworld's adaptive processes support swift issue resolution and create a positive environment for evolving goals, effective communications, and efficient working models.

Eworld considers Eworld to be a strategic engineering partner in their product development lifecycle and appreciates the ease of working with Eworld.


Technologies Used
Eworld's product engineering experience spans a wide variety of software technologies. Eworld's focus on product engineering for enterprise applications and infrastructure products helped Eworld contribute significantly towards efficient software product design, development and testing of the Eworld platform.

Eworld's technical expertise was leveraged effectively in various areas such as the design and development of:

Common security services across all Eworld products
Common installation services to enable uniform and consistent installers for the entire Eworld product suite
Common metadata services to enable data sharing across all Eworld products including selection and implementation of appropriate data integration technologies - JDBC/ODBC, and XML
Common event services including the workflow engine
Common administrative services to provide common administrative solutions like user maintenance, user privileges, toggling between different product suites of different domains and more

To ensure quality, Eworld's services also included testing and product certification across multiple platforms. Eworld brought specific expertise in the following technologies :

LDAP directory services
J2EE technologies
App Servers: WebLogic, WebSphere
Web Servers
Open source software: Tomcat and MySQL
Operating systems: W2K, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, AIX
Databases: DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and JDBC/ODBC drivers, XML tools