Consulting

Information Technology

From Strategy to Execution.

These days, it seems everyone is trying keep up with the hottest innovations in fast-moving technologies such as mobile, cloud, big data, wearables, and even connected and IoT devices. The pace of change is so relentless that staying abreast can sometimes be overwhelming.

How we can help.

About Objects can provide a temporary supplement to your team's current skills and knowledge to bridge the gap. We bring to bear extensive experience developing solutions that require the integration of multiple platforms to form a seamless product.

As a company with training in its DNA, we have a strong focus on the transfer of knowledge and skills. So if your organization has a goal of elevating its practices, we can help by both doing and teaching. Here are some of the services we can provide:

• A rapid but thorough assessment of your organization’s current practices to identify areas of highest risk
• Classroom training conducted by our experts
• Onsite mentoring from our senior architects and engineers
• Co-development, with an emphasis on knowledge transfer
• Offsite component or product development, supplemented by training and/or mentoring on the deliverables

Our practitioners are great at mentoring — as well as executing — across the entire spectrum. So while we’re happy to build a complete product or platform for you, we’d much prefer to build it with your team. Our goal is not only to help you get your product to the finish line — though obviously that’s important. Our overarching goal is to leave your team stronger and more capable than we found it.

The About Objects difference.

Our work on mobile, cloud, and other emerging technology platforms includes years of mobile development experience. So although much of the work we perform is at the macro level — architecture, development process and methodology, enterprise and cloud integration, test strategies, and the like — we’re also intimately familiar with the wide array of low-level details that go into the design and engineering of, for example, a truly polished iPad app.

The upshot is that we’re well positioned to help your team avoid common engineering, design, and usability mistakes, while showing them how to take best advantage of the capabilities of a given platform. At the same time, we’ll also help with the bigger picture items in terms of integration with new and existing enterprise technology solutions.

In sum…

We’d love to talk with you about how we might be able to contribute to your current and future development efforts.

Our Software Engineering Process

Pragmatic, Disciplined, Battle Tested.

We spend a lot of time thinking about why various approaches to software development have their observed effects. Doing so enables us to more easily trace issues that may be hampering an IT organization's effectiveness back to root causes. It also helps us always be awake to opportunities to further optimize our own practices.

As practitioners, we believe in tempering theory with the results of our own first-hand observation. The process and methodology we follow has been synthesized not only from other well-established approaches, but also from the fruit of hands-on experience with the things we've seen work — or not work — in actual practice. Because our approach is pragmatic rather than strictly by the book, it's relatively easy for us to tailor our process and methodology to mesh smoothly with the goals and preferences of each unique customer.

• We identify and address high-risk areas early.
• We balance agile and traditional approaches to maintain accountability.
• We're flexible — we can tailor our process and methodology to meet your needs.
• Teaching is in our DNA. Our ultimate goal is to transfer knowledge, skills, and best practices to your team.

Getting the most from agile practices.

Like any other methodology, Agile has its strengths and weaknesses. In a nutshell, here's what we've observed: in migrating to agile practices, IT organizations often unwittingly lose some measure of accountability, particularly with respect to change management. We can walk you through practical steps you can take to manage change as effectively as in the past in a way that's fully consistent with today's methodologies.

The challenge.

The need for speed has led development organizations to migrate away from more traditional, formal process and methodology. Often, though, important things get lost or diminished in the transition. For example, agile teams often struggle managing user expectations because of a lack of clarity about what’s to be delivered. To make matters worse, changes to scope and changing interpretations of user requirements are often inadequately communicated.

Unfortunately, software design often tends to get overlooked in favor of quickly working through user stories. Sprints can bog down or under-deliver because areas of technical risk may not be identified until far too late.

The solution.

Our fully documented software engineering process was designed from the ground up to let development teams move fast without sacrificing control. The key is to limit unpleasant surprises, especially the disruptive ones that arise late in the cycle. Our process is iterative, risk-driven, architecture-centric, and infused with agile concepts. It's a synthesis of the Open Unified Process, Agile, and Scrum, tempered by decades of full life cycle software engineering experience.

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  inception

  Critical thinking, activities, and deliverables to focus the project and provide a roadmap for execution. We make sure that the project's guiding principles are defined and documented, and that comprehensive estimates are produced and validated.

  • Deliverables provide a roadmap for execution.
  • The project mission is defined and documented.
  • Potential use cases are identified; those with significant architectural risk are prioritized so they can be addressed in early sprints.
  • It’s okay at this stage for use cases to be brief outlines — further details will be fleshed out and documented during later sprints. Comprehensive estimates are produced.
• 

  elaboration & construction

  Agile sprints for requirements, design, architecture, implementation, testing, and continuous integration. In parallel, we gather requirements in the form of use cases to provide traceability and a basis for communicating the impacts of changes. We make sure that all architectural risks are identified and mitigated during the early sprints. At the end of each sprint the application is demonstrated, velocity is assessed, corrections are made, and changes that impact scope, time, and money are reported to management.

  • High risk items are tackled early.
  • User stories are mapped to use cases to improve tracking.
  • Test plans are derived from use cases.
  • The project manager maintains a project plan to track status for enhanced feedback to users.
  • The PM ensures that changes to requirements, scope, or schedule are adequately communicated and negotiated with stakeholders.
  • Known risks are tracked and reviewed with the team weekly.
• 

  transition

  Preparation for delivery, with DevOps and testing incorporated in each sprint. DevOps scripts are developed and tested in pre-release test environments. Teams external to the development team are included in sprint activities for deployment, performance, integration, and application testing. We can share numerous techniques we've evolved over the years to improve cross-team collaboration and production readiness.

  • Automated deployment scripts developed for the deployment team to minimize time-consuming and error-prone manual steps.
  • Deployment automation addresses all test and production environments.
  • External groups begin testing functionality, user experience, and integration with other systems in separate test environments.
  • Integration with collaborating systems at this stage yields more meaningful performance test results.

Design That Works

Know The User, Know The Platform

A well-designed application is simple and useful. A great application embodies the elegance inherent in a balanced combination of those two qualities. Design begins and ends with a keen understanding of the user. Putting users in the center of the design process allows designers to validate hypotheses that can otherwise give rise to speculative assumptions, and hours of conference room debates.

The constraints of mobile devices (tiny screens, brief interactions, imprecise input) led to major changes in approach to user experience design. Websites and mobile apps needed to have simpler layouts and be radically easier to use than their desktop counterparts. Navigation had to be clear and obvious.

As designers found solutions to these design issues, they began to integrate the new patterns that emerged into desktop design as well. As a result, design approaches have changed across the board, and are now a common part of the average user's everyday experience.

Since apps are increasingly used on the go, awkward user interfaces have gone from being perceived as a mere annoyance, to being treated as unacceptable. With hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from, the bar has been set higher than ever. User experience has become absolutely critical to success. The following are some key ingredients.

DESIGN FOR THE TARGET PLATFORM

There's a common pitfall we've seen occur commonly, and it's usually a costly one. It generally has some or all of the following components:

• The design team is separate from the engineering team.
• The designers don't have experience with the target platform.
• Designs are executed without taking into account the platform's engineering constraints and human interface guidelines.
• Engineers struggle to implement the design because it doesn't align with available components and APIs.
• The product ships late and over budget due to the extra engineering effort required to build custom capabilities.
• The next major release of the target platform's frameworks causes significant breakage to a number of custom components, which then have to be either discarded or repaired.

At About Objects, our designers and engineers work closely together. We're keenly aware of platform features, and know how to design and implement features to take maximum advantage of inherent capabilities.

Consulting Services That Deliver

Custom Tailored To Your Needs

Today's organizations are under increased pressure to deliver well-designed solutions while balancing time-to-market deadlines, navigating through a quickly evolving IT environment, and responding to market changes. Leverage our decades of enterprise experience to better position your team for success. We partner closely with clients to deliver quality solutions on-time and on-budget. Our specialization in mobile (iOS and Android), cloud/big data, microservices, and back-end architecture allows us to customize solutions that are tailored to your organization.

Our Service Offerings