For IT Managers
We know that you want to work with vendors who have the capability to deliver complex enterprise applications, fit closely with your team and development practices, have a consistent method for project delivery, and provide quality deliverables.
Our Capabilities
Our core capability is the delivery of enterprise software. We are technology-agnostic and have specialized expertise in enterprise architectures and solutions in the Financial Services, Insurance, and Healthcare industry verticals.
Architecture and solutions built and deployed:
- Service Oriented Architecture - Asset Management, Credit Risk, Health Care Subscriber and Provider Systems
- Data warehouses - Enterprise Reporting Systems, Billing, OLTP and OLAP integration, Data analysis and Modeling
- Transaction-volume driven OLTP systems - Online Banking, Equity / Mutual Fund Order System
- Workflow systems - Credit Processing and Risk Management Portal
Specific technologies we employ:
- Client Tier: Java web applications (Struts, Spring, Tapestry frameworks), Java Swing, Python, Perl, PHP, VB, Ruby
- Service/Transaction Tier: J2EE EJB, SOAP
- Transports: JMS, MQ Series, Tibco, SOAP-RPC, XML-RPC, RMI
- Persistence: BMP/CMP EJB 2.0, Hibernate, JDBC
- Application Servers: IBM Websphere (5.x, 6.x), BEA Weblogic (7.x, 8.x), Tomcat, JBoss
- Data Warehousing: Business Objects , Cognos, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase
We have experience in all aspects of data warehousing technologies:
- Architecture and scalability analysis
- Hardware architecture
- Fact and dimension table modelling
- ETL development
- RDBMS implementation and tuning
- Metadata management
- Ad-hoc query and reporting
We have delivered projects both on-site with our client's technology delivery team and remotely at our offices.
Our Teams
After initial discussions with the client's technology manager and project manager, we work together to find the best team structure. We've been successful in augmenting existing teams, and in taking responsibility for the delivery of either subcomponents of your overall project or entire systems. We employ a holistic approach to staffing projects, considering both technology skill requirements and overall team fit and composition.
Where The Jonah Group is responsible for the delivery, we recommend that key personnel from your technology team be engaged through the lifecycle of the project. Our aim is to not only deliver a capable system but ensure that you retain deep knowledge of the system and its construction. Rather than performing a handoff at the end of the project, we believe that knowledge should be transferred throughout the project.
Our Method
"Be as Agile as you can be". What does this mean to you as the person with delivery responsibility? It means that though we favour agile methodologies, we can tailor our process to meet your needs and constraints. Our client's delivery processes range from full Rational Unified Process execution to Agile / XP projects with short iterations, ongoing requirements gathering and continuous delivery. We choose practices from each method as appropriate for each project.
The Jonah Method is a synthesis of ideas from Jacobson's use-case driven Object-Oriented Software Engineering (OOSE) method and lightweight methodologies like Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) such as automated unit testing, continuous integration, and frequent, iterative delivery.
We believe that only those elements of a method that are appropriate for the project at hand should be selected, and further that these vary widely from project to project. A working system is the only real measure of success. The process needs to be effective enough to deliver consistently and deliver what was intended.
More detail of our method is covered in an overview of our Method or in detail in our Jonah Method white paper.
Quality Deliverables
A project that is delivered on-time but has poor quality is not a successful project. Our commitment to quality is well-understood internally, and is formalized in writing in our staff agreements. Several practices support our quality value:
- The requirements and design models must be accurate. This means that the requirements are reviewed by the business teams, cross-referenced, and traceable from the stated goals of the business plan.
- The requirements and design models must be useful. This means that the language isn't so technically arcane that it interferes with the business intent, but is sufficiently detailed that developers need not invent requirements while building the system.
- Automated test plans and continuous integration; For both cost savings and increased code quality, we have found that writing unit tests first (or in conjunction) with coding results in much higher code quality and fewer defects. Automating a collection of unit tests means that changes in requirements (no matter when they arrive) are handled with the confidence that the system will be remain verifiable and stable. A practice of continuous integration not only increases the likelihood that the system remains in a stable state at all times, but it also allows us to deliver a working version of the system to our client soon after they request it.
- Code reviews throughout the construction phase to ensure adherence to coding standards; We view code reviews as opportunities for learning and to improve code consistency. Every developer has their own views and methods; code reviews allow for code consistency and help to identify potential performance issues early on.
- Performance testing and tuning. Most projects benefit from performance testing prior to deployment. Performance testing is scheduled near the end of an iteration to gather data to support decisions about any remediation that might be necessary.
