 Case Studies |
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| • A Workflow Solutions for Newspaper Houses (Duration – 15 months) |
| A challenge to create a complete software solution for any Newspaper publishing house:
- Ever-changing requirements of the target industry - need for robust and extensible architecture
- Variety of roles, Different ways to access the system - various interfaces/clients
- Many information/data sources/means
- Multiple platforms,
- Real-time update capability from Client/Server
- Offline-Online processing and synchronization
We successfully completed this product using 3 distinct stages, each involving a 1 month feasibility study (due to pressure on latest technology front). Each stage following full SDLC and consisting of at least 4 quality releases to the customer, including test cases/reports etc, for acceptance.
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• Content Management System Product Re-engineering
(Duration – 3 different products, each taking 6-8 months) |
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A plethora of features not all well understood by a customer which acquired a product having a source codebase of 10+ years. The product just worked, however it needed to be rewritten to cope up with market pressures for a new growth roadmap!
1) Plan of Action - 2 weeks
Estimation -
1 Project Plan - Resources, Time, Deliverables, Risks put upfront. Total transparency.
2 Change management - Essential!Each Phase means schedule adjustments based on ever-improving
knowledge, facts.
3 Kick start - minimum resources to begin with. Additional resources in next cycles.
2) Cycle 1 - Timeline - 1 month
1. Research - Reverse Engineering feasibility and trials.
2. Analysis - Start from top down, bottom up in parallel.
- Understand architecture, technologies, custom protocols, configuration etc.
- Get straight to code - classes, object diagrams, event/time based interactions, state transitions etc.
3. Estimation for Cycle 2. With specific milestones M0 - Design Phase, M1 - First Build, M2 - Feature Set1,
M3 - Feature Set2,, M4 - Beta, M5 - Final Release.
3) Cycle 2: Timeline - 8 months
4) Design - Increase the number of resources.
- Start from a fresh plane. Reuse architecture, design, code, as much as possible.
- Use pieces of design, code as and when appropriate.
- Small implementations at least priority.
5) Implementation - First Build to Final Release!
- First Build of significance. First results, working system.
- First feedback. Follow ups!
- Next stages, increasingly volume tasks until M4 (Beta) release.
- Regular feedback.
- Online Bug/Issue Tracking System visible to customer - to use, review, raise/lower bug/ssue priorities etc.
- Final Debug Cycle. QA on fire! Daily bug triaging - Assess/Mark priorities/severities, weed out, push for
product shipping!
6) Feedback/Maintenance - Free of cost! Our responsibility! |
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| • AcroForms like creation in Xpress (Duration – 10 months) |
| The objective was to create AcroForms like environment as it exists in Adobe Acrobat Professional) within Quark XPress 6.1 on both, Windows and MacOSX. It was made to allow users to create PDF forms based on existing Quark XPress document. Best feature was that the user could also preview and work only with the PDF form in a true environment (within Xpress). It included a PDF form fields importer feature where we imported a PDF’s form fields onto Quark XPress document i.e., to allow a user to use existing PDF forms for creating a form from Quark XPress document. This involved creation of a PDF parser.
Some specific technical details: Mac OS X, Windows XP, C++, XPress 6.x, PDF, PostScript, XML, PDFMark, Adobe Distiller, Codewarrior 8.x, VC, CVS etc. |
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| • Universal Binary Quark XPress tools (Duration - 1 year) |
We developed a complete suite of new tools created for XPress 7.x UB and PPC. Another set of tools were migrated and enhanced from QXP 6.1 to 7.x. This involved extensive research and development with (then) yet to be launched Xpress 7. We worked with a Beta version for ¾th of the timeline for this project.
Of course, this included migration from CodeWarrior to Xcode and from PPC to Universal Binary. Since we had very good Xcode experience already, we could move things quickly and work with the new environment for Xtensions with less worries.
Some specific technical details: Mac OS X (Intel/PPC), Quark XPress 7.x, Codewarrior 9.x, Xcode 2.2, CVS |
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