Strategic Systems provides a highly effective mentoring service to ensure your development efforts are maximising industry best-practices. Our senior consultants bring many years of applied experience in the key agile and OO software development and management techniques.

Our aim is to transfer the skills and experience of key techniques to your staff, on-site and as a member of your project/product team.

Draw on the experience in working with key techniques from XP, Scrum, FDD, Crystal, DSDM and other agile methodologies. Our senior consultants can help identify which agile techniques are best suited to improve your software development activities.

The typical Agile consulting services usually includes working with your team to identify and prioritise the main areas/issues that need to be addressed. From here, the experience with a wide range of agile (and OO) techniques is drawn on to establish a custom agile software development process tailored to your situation. This becomes the "road-map" to then introduce and implement these practices through initial/pilot projects.

We can also mentor these techniques through the initial projects and assist with the tailoring of such techniques to better suite the tools and environment that you operate with.

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If you are looking/wanting to gain the rewards (productivity, reuse, extensible design, quality, etc) of developing in an Object-Oriented paradigm but don't want to "learn the hard-way" then our OO migration service is the solution.

Our senior consultants have been down this road before and have successfully migrated companies to being highly respected Object-Oriented development "houses".

In order for a software development team to obtain the status of being an Object-Oriented development "house" many facets need to be addressed. From the OOA/D methodology, framework development, design patterns, OO programming language, achieving reuse, dependency management, etc. Our senior consultants can provide the migration path.

One of the keys to a successful OO migration is the ability to introduce the new concepts, techniques and tools through existing and planned software development efforts. This way the team learns through the application of OO, which is increased through successive development efforts and the planned development schedules are kept, if not improved.

Read some articles/papers that have been written on the various OO development activities we have been involved in:

• eXtreme Programming virtues and benefits - a case study of Seeing Machines' adoption of XP (and other) practices (pdf - 120k)
• Software Engineering Disposable Packages - the focus of software architecture (pdf - 82k)
• OO Migration and Software Improvement Practices - a case study of the migration to OO by Nautronix Ltd

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Strategic Systems provides experienced Project Management services to ensure your project is well controlled, highly focused, productive and going to deliver.

These services are available to either assist with the critical project start-up phase or to manage the entire project from start to finish. At the start-up phase our Project Management services can be used to facilitate a technology-transfer with your own managers on key project management techniques, such as iterative development, project velocity, scope control, PERT estimation, WBS, S-curve analysis, earned-value, etc.

Our senior consultants have project managed a range of development projects covering the defence, government and commercial sectors, from GIS based IT systems and three-tier applications, to algorithmically complex real-time embedded systems. These projects have employed a wide range of development tools, been developed on Unix (Sun, HP and Linux), Windows 32 bit and embedded platforms, implemented in Java, C++, VB.Net, Ada and Delphi programming languages, applied the UML, OMT, Booch and OOSE (Jacobson) methodologies and integrated a range of Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) products (Oracle, Ingres, ESRI GIS, CARIS GIS, various reuse libraries, GUI builders, etc).

The common aspects to all of these projects has been the application of an effective/practical development process, including project management. Through this, the entire team has a clear path of what needs to be done and how to do it, with concrete technical and management progress feedback mechanisms.

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We also provide experienced OO software developers who can join your team for short to long-term contracts, from the Software Architecture level to implementation and testing. Our developers bring with them applied knowledge of key techniques that they have personally worked with, as well as skills and experience in today's technologies.

This is often a good vehicle for the mentoring (show by example) of techniques such as architectural principles, design patterns, automated testing, code inspections, etc.

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Joint Application Development (JAD) is a highly acclaimed technique for capturing the capabilities and functional requirements of the system. With approximately 75% of all software development efforts failing to meet the customers requirements, this technique will put your project on the right track from day one.

Strategic Systems provides the independent facilitation services to ensure that your customers, domain experts and developers (the "joint" participants) establish, understand and prioritise the scope of the system.

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If you have a project under-way but feel you don't have the visibility or control that you should, then Strategic Systems can perform a focused assessment to reveal the issues and provide you with recommendations of a way ahead.

Risks, by their very nature, come in all shapes and sizes. As such, our assessments can focus on the technical (e.g. requirements traceability, design feasibility, etc), management (e.g. schedule, estimations, resources, etc) and/or process (e.g. requirements capture, design representation, code quality, testing techniques, etc) areas.

These assignments typically range from two to ten days and a full written report, detailing the identified risks, potential consequences and alternative actions, is provided. You can also opt for an ongoing assessment (typically monthly) to provide an independent view on the status/progress of your critical projects.

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"Red-team" reviews are a highly effective means of ensuring that your tender response, project plan, requirements specification, etc, is logical, complete and meets all of your objectives / win themes before they go to your customer.

Having an independent person, who is not biased by the project and/or company knowledge will reveal many issues that are "hidden" to your own people. Our red-team review service provides high calibre individuals who have written and worked with a wide range of deliverable material.

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