Software Architecture

Solve Technical Staffing Challenges

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:39:00 GMT

Artemis now offers staff augmentation services—customized to fit your needs

Do you have a large software project coming up—but not the permanent staff to handle it? Maybe you’re thinking of implementing voice over IP for your call center, but don’t have the telephony expertise in-house. Now, Artemis can help you find the best solution to your technical staffing issues.

With our new staff augmentation services, we have put our years of experience locating and screening technical hires to work for our clients. We set a high bar for Artemis employees, and we’ll make sure that you also get the best.

We do the work. You enjoy the rewards.

At Artemis, we have the industry knowledge to hire for a wide range of specializations. Our state-of-the-art system for networking with job seekers keeps us in touch with an unmatched candidate pool. We draw on established relationships with local talent, referrals from internal staff, and access to major job boards to build a comprehensive internal database. As a result, we can connect you with technical professionals in the following fields:

Software applications. Java, .net, ABAP, and Cobol developers; Oracle, DB2, and SQL database administrators; Lawson and SAP consultants

Infrastructure. Network administrators, Unix administrators, Cisco engineers, helpdesk technicians, network technicians, desktop support, network security consultants

Telecommunications. PBX administrators, VoIP consultants, CCIEs, CCNAs, RF engineers, cell site technicians, drive testers, convergence consultants

We will do the searching and screening to find the top candidates for you. Then, we will provide you with a complete Candidate Package for each potential hire so your final hiring decision is informed, efficient, and effective. Each package includes: a relevant, clear, and concise resume; a technical scoring chart based on your requirements; and detailed reference forms for each reference check.

Flexible, Low-Risk Staffing Options

Whether your staffing requirements are short-term, permanent, large or small, Artemis has an employment option to fit. For temporary needs, we offer staff on an at-will, contract basis at a flat hourly rate.

If you are looking for a permanent hire, we will recruit employees for direct placement for a flat fee. There is a 30-day evaluation period before we invoice for direct placement, so you can ensure that your new employee is a good fit with the organization. For even more flexibility, we also have a 6-month contract-to-hire option. And, of course, our clients are always welcome to interview candidates themselves before taking them on.

We can assemble a full project team for large projects, including a project manager if desired. Or we can fill the gaps in your team as needed. Whether you are looking for one employee or twenty, we’ll give each candidate the same attention and careful screening.

For a sample Candidate Package, or more information, contact me

Presentation patterns, MVC

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:19:00 GMT

You guys may know Martin Fowler…he is like the god of design patterns, software architecture and most importantly, Agile software development.

He has an interesting pattern called the Supervisor pattern, which is sort of a subset of the MVC pattern (very common amongst heavy J2EE developers). I think it’s a great read, and a pattern that is worth exploring. Especially, as we have some apps that are going to be developed to run on the web, with a subset of functionality running on a mobile device.

Here is a blog illustrating the ease of unit tests on UI, when using this pattern:

http://haacked.com/archive/2006/08/09/ASP.NETSupervisingControllerModelViewPresenterFromSchematicToUnitTestsToCode.aspx

Reduction in complexity of the front end (one of the current challenges in EMR), relatively easy unit tests of the presentation layer and control behaviors.

The Presentation pattern is also worth looking into.

If anyone looks into this, please share with everyone what you are finding.

Oracle changing the game??

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 22:28:00 GMT

Looks like Oracle is going after the SMB business! Wow, this is serious!

Oracle standard is now priced at $149 per user OR $4995 per processor. Wow, oracle is serious!!

How to bid on projects - using Agile methodologies

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 10:05:00 GMT

As an application development consulting firm, our potential buyers will usually ask for a price quote or estimate. This calls for defining scope, timeframe and $$. That's all good, if you are applying traditional waterfall methodologies. But when you plan to build an application using agile methodologies - the ball-game is different. The whole point of agile is that you can not predict the future. You are not spending time upfront doing a lot of design specifications, which is what is required to come up with a fixed price quote! So, you can't really come up with a fixed price quote or even an estimate. “WHOT!!” is what I imagine you'd hear from the customer! This is one of the dillemas of applying agile techniques in a consulting firm. And this may make the sales pitch for the project a little tougher...but perhaps doable?

I think the pitch will be tougher than what we are used to. I'm thinking about the pain of “pitching“ the agile framework to every single customer project you are about to take; it seems like it could be quite a bit of work (we get about 5 new projects every month!). The consultant will have to sell the client mainly on the fact that software is unpredictable...software is a complicated form of engineering. 90% of IT companies and software companies, including huge companies such as Microsoft, ship their products late, and over-budget! It is simply not efficient to scope and spec your whole app up front, it results in resistance to change later in the lifecycle of the application, resulting in a not-so-good application. The designer needs to be involved in any major code change that digresses from his/her design. The designer may not easily see the need for the change as well as the coder. The client doesn't get business value out of their application until full specs is complete and perhaps the first module built. All in all, traditional methodologies does NOT embrace change, and change is one constant that is here to stay in the software realm. Looking at the traditional methodologies closer though, it is interesting to observe that the framework that makes you think of designing a blue-print for your application before writing anything...is a framework that has stood the test of time in every other engineering practice. Before a house is built, there is a schema built by the architect. Before a car is built, there is a huge planning process....and the same goes for pretty much every other industry. Traditionalists will then ask, why does software engineering have to be different?? They say: over the years, most people ship products over-budget, late and sub-par quality because nobody every does the specing and designing upfront right - everyone is too lazy to do it right! Yes, the software engineering field is relatively young...there are a lot of geniouses out there that have built software, yet the results are the same...it's late again!!! Another truth is that, over the years EVERY developer thinks about it every single day they program, that to do things RIGHT (traditional)...they really should write a more specs - and I honestly think that everyone strives to do this, to various levels. They say they're done with the specs page, when they look at the timeline, and nothing has been done, other than a bunch of UMLs, word documents, etc. They've billed $35,000 already, on a $50,000 project! and the client does not have anything!!!

On the other hand, Agile methodologies promise to provide business value very quickly, since the plan is to have many iterations. Change is embraced and encouraged through refactoring. Incremental roll-outs is the essence...For a 6 month agile project, by week 3 or so, the client should have the app on their machines, with some features already implemented, and hopefully usable...frequent iterations will follow until the project completes. The agile pitch is that the client can cancel the project at any time! This is one of the most compelling selling points...since at any point in time, the client should have realized value out of the $$ they have spent so far.

How then do you quote agile projects? Does Agile always work? Is it applicable to all projects? Are you going to be able to sell Agile to your next client?

My take: To sell an Agile development engagement, you need to listen to what Martin Fowler suggests: "We have $x to spend and we need a release on the 1st of December. We'll collaborate together to come up with the best set of features to go live with on that date." Agile vs Traditional isn't quite black and white...there is a grey spectrum, and you should find your sweet-spot on the spectrum. Tending to more Agile on your projects is NOT always the right way to go, evaluate the engagement/project/client first. Selling the Agile way, will depend on the maturity of your client (in IT terms). Larger and more complex applications are more suited for more of the Agile side of the spectrum. BUT, if you have Coders, don't try to be Agile!...if you have Developers, you will be more successful doing Agile! (See difference between coders and developers). If you have a mix of offshore/nearshore and designers/consultants with clients, going Agile may be tougher, but is doable.

RSS reader evaluation

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:29:00 GMT

So far Newz Crawler is winning. I really liked the fact that my initial setup time was quick. All you need do is browse to the pages that contain links to the RSS feeds you're interested in. Newz Crawler sits in the system tray, and makes a list of all the rss feeds it “discovers”...once you're done browsing around...just go to the list...select the ones you want to subscribe them to. Pick a folder. And you're good to go.

I abandoned the other ones I tried because it was too many clicks to add each feed...or maybe I just didn't find a good way to add many rss feeds without copying URLs all around.

Cadium Process released

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:09:00 GMT

The 1.0 version of our Consulting/development process has now been released. After over 5 years in the industry, we just have not found the right “process”, methodology, role assignment, that just works right. If you know about the intricacies of a software development, you understand how complicated it is, and how it can be tough to clearly assign team roles, be good at estimation, have a low defect rate, spend enough time on architecture, release application in the promised timeline, prevent scope creep, have a nice project staging process, track your sales pipeline, manage client relationships and upsell, etc, etc...there is just so many things that need to be done to have a scalable application dev consulting business that is > $1million in yearly revenue.

In order to reach our goals, we have been working on various aspects of our business model and process. We came up with a process called Cadium. You can find a PDF of the steps, in the Cadium process. In summary, CADIUM stands for Consulting, Architecture, Development, Implementation, User Docs/training and Maintenance. Find a PDF of the process here.

There are also many roles involved in CADIUM such as Consultants, Testers, Developers, Sales Personnel, Lead Developers, Project Managers, Application Support, Trainers...

Cadium was also built to be able to support a consulting group that has parts of the team “outsourced”, “off-shored” or “near-shored”

Other aspects of Cadium that is not documented in the PDF above are Key metrics that must be tracked, such as Estimation (estimated hours vs actual hours), Timeline (estimated timeline vs actual timeline), Quality (defect rate per milestone/task), Scope Creep (feature scope creep per Cadium phase), ROI ($ spent by customer on project vs $saved over 1.5 years), Customer satisfaction (overall customer satisfaction)

Cadium also preaches, milestoning and timelining all developer/tester activities, weekly broadcasts on project status from developers to consultants, and from consultants to clients. Also, daily SCRUM meetings amongst developers and project managers, and consultants and project managers are essential.

Cadium has a key constant, called Alpha, which is defined as 1.5. It is used during the estimation process.

Enjoy.

Business Intelligence seminar

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 18:07:00 GMT

Like I mentioned before, our Business Intelligence seminar seems to have really touched most of the attendees. Talking with the different attendees, make me realize that the Managers who attended learnt a lot, and most of them have it on their priority list to implement a Business Intelligence project in their enterprise in the near future. Most of such projects will make use of various technologies such as: Sharepoint portal server, Office web components, MS Office Scorecards accelerator, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Analysis Services, Proclarity and Microsoft Data Analyzer.

It seems to make sense that we need to do more of these seminars. I hope to start working on that soon. There are also a lot of improvement that the presentation slides could use. I will begin working on that soon.

Thanks all - to all those who attended...and those who made the event a success. Artemis first Business Intelligence seminar.

Business Seminar I :: Shaping strategic goals with Business Intelligence solutions.

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 22:06:00 GMT

This is a rough agenda I'm proposing for our BI seminar coming up very soon. I'm excited about it, and working on some cool demos. Had a few emergency situations in the past 3 days, so progress on that has been seriously delayed.

Opening speech

Introduction by Dan Michaels, Microsoft Corporation

Seminar Agenda

a. What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

b. Business Reasons to implement BI

i. Strategic planning

ii. Productivity

iii. Decision making

iv. Speed

v. Consolidation of data/knowledge

c. How BI can change the culture of your company (Demo)

i. accountability

ii. visibility

iii. communication

iv. empowered "local decision makers"

d. Application of BI in the enterprise

i. Comparing BI reports to traditional reporting

ii. Analysis

1. Real-time business analysis

2. Root cause analysis

3. Post-mortems

e. Do I need BI?

i. Business perspective

ii. IT perspective

f. Building your BI system

i. Planning

1. Executive support and involvement

2. Education, communication and visibility of strategy

3. Measurement of effectiveness

4. Constant feedback loops

ii. Perspectives

1. Employee

2. Business process

3. Customer

4. Financial

iii. Architecting the data-warehouse

1. Strategic map builder

2. Scorecards definition

3. Key Performance Indicators that drive your business

4. Front-end views, intranet system

g. Case study: Contosso Foods

i. Business problem

ii. Solution

iii. Demo

Q & A

Closing remarks

Building business intelligence applications with .NET - Part 1

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 16:19:00 GMT

This is part 1 of a 4 series article I am currently writing about business intelligence. In the near future, I will post parts 2 through 4. Please feel free to send comments/feedback on the things I talk about htere. Thank you.

This is the title of the talk I will be giving at our GLUGNET (www.glugnet.org) .NET user group. I am really excited about the opportunity to give this presentation...even as the Program Director of the group. I also hope that someday, I will be opportuned to give the same talk in the NGDevelopers .NET usergroup - the user group we are kicking off in Nigeria, dedicated to .NET development.

This talk will circle around quite a number of concepts and technologies. Concept wise, it will start off giving an overview of the business reasons to intiate a business intelligence project in any enterprise. Business IQ, the ability to make quick decisions, similar to Agile development methodologies, that enable software development teams to react quickly to changing conditions...that's the same way that Business IQ enables an enterprise to be agile, by enabling “decision workers” to make quick decisions, by empowering them with the exact information they need. BI is all about the right information, to the right people at the right time.

This means that a BI solution seeks to provide a very intuitive and ultra-flexible view of data, in real-time, to enable decision workers to ask a very wide range of ad-hoc questions on their data. And from this data, a person can make critical changes in their operations, in real-time.

For example, BI allows a VP of sales to ask questions such as:

1. What day of the week are my sales people most productive

2. Which type of product is sales person X best at selling

3. What time of the day are my sales people most productive

4. Which of the marketing channels that we use has given the highest returns in the past quarter? How does this compare to the same quarter in the past 10 years?

5. What are my 5 top selling products in Region X for marketing Channel Y

As you can see, the questions are endless. With a properly architected BI solution, a single BI project will enable workers to ask all of the questions above, without the need for any additional development, or involving IT at all! That is the power of BI.

Business Intelligence, is essentially a powerful analytical datawarehousing solution that allows you to report metrics in a multi-dimensional format.

The metrics, better called Key Performance Indicators are the measures that drive your business. The ability to see all the important KPIs to your business on an unlimited combination of dimensions, is what makes BI solutions so powerful. Your dimensions define “HOW” you look at the data, for example: By location, by product type, by region, by zip code, by age group, by time of the day, by quarter, by year, etc.

BI solutions can enable C level executives to communicate corporate strategies. It helps to improve accountability and visibility across the enterprise. It also enables workers to understand how their daily work contributes to the overall mission/goals and strategies of the business. As such, it enables workers to be able to on-the-fly adjust their work practices/efforts to further drive the KPI they are responsible for. What a way to drive productivity in your business.

Building business intelligence applications with .NET - Part 3

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:27:00 GMT

Using Artemis Solutions Group as a case study.

At Artemis, (just like any other growing company out there), we track a lot of data relating to client activities - billable time, non billable time, invoiced $$, project timelines, project budgets, hardware requests and orders, support tasks, project deliverables, etc. Most of these data end up in various systems: excel spreadsheets, access dbs, sql server db, quickbooks, phpCollab, sharepoint, etc. All of this data, kept in different places, by different people helps us to run the day-to-day business.

Just like most other companies, we mainly measure, track and observe trends in financial information. Meanwhile, the true "Company Health" is measured by four perspectives: 1. Learning/growth/knowledgebase/satisfaction of employees perspective 2. Business process perspective 3. Customer perspective 4. Financial perspective.

What if we could create Key Performance Indicators that measure all 4 perspectives of an enterprise? What if there was a way, to pull all of these data together into one place for better visibility? What if you could have a simple high level view of some key performance indicator(KPI), and then be able to drill down to the actual root cause for the indicated trend? What if you could look at a KPI in hundreds of ways - (multidimensional cubes)? What if you can now have a single simplfied view of all aspects of company health, rather than just financial measures (customer satisfaction trends, business process improvement trends, internal learning/growth/knowledgebase, etc)?

That is what Business Intelligence is!!

Business Intelligence provides a robust framework that allows you to pull various data across your enterprise together, representing different indicators (not just financial data), to help form a unified view of the enterprise. This empowers executives and managers to generate insights and make better decisions. It also helps energize employees to focus on the right things, with near real-time feedback on the effectiveness of their efforts!

Business Intelligence allows the measurement and management of critical aspects of the company that contribute towards meeting strategic goals and objectives.

Traditional financial measures fall short in this area - they are focused on the past!

With the Artemis BI solution, we will seek to measure KPIs that drive our strategic goals, for example:: 1. Customer Service 2. Quality 3. Innovation 4. Profitability etc etc