Bluenog Solutions Methodology

Bluenog Solutions Methodology – Bluenog employs a solution methodology that is used to great success. Regardless of where you are in the development cycle, Bluenog’s Solution Methodology can be used to facilitate success. The methodology consists of the following 5 steps:

• SOA Blueprint - Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not a buzzword and not a product. SOA is a methodology around best practices. Making sure your organization is following the right design and methodology principles for your business is critical to the success of any project. For those companies that have not created or implemented an SOA Blueprint, this is a first and required step. There are several aspects to creating an SOA Blueprint:
• A Discovery or Planning session. This can last a few days to a few weeks depending on the scope of the project. This helps identify the “As-is” framework and “To-be” expected end state. This will include extensive interviews with project sponsors, business owners, IT Architects and other related personnel.
• Iterative sessions with the project sponsors and business owners to ensure the core aspects of the project and infrastructure are completely understood and documented.
• Identifying the specific “Project Plan” for the current project – which includes resource requirements, technical requirements and expected timeframe.
• Potential high-level evaluation of technologies for evaluation/inclusion into the SOA Blueprint.
• Architecture & Design (Project PoC) – Typically, to get line of business support and funding, a Proof of Concept (PoC) is performed that shows the basis of the project. This should be a relatively short (3-6 week) endeavor. It is not meant to be a completed application or something that can easily be moved right into production. At the same time, it needs to embrace the proper IT foundation and design principles, so that the move from PoC to production does not constitute an entire rewrite of the PoC. It is typically in this phase that product evaluations are performed and technology chosen for the PoC. This can extend the PoC timeframe.
• Architecture Design & Implementation – Once the PoC has been validated, the actual implementation begins. Of course, another round of Architecture and Design (after the PoC) is performed to implement lessons learned from the PoC and to add functionality that the PoC did not address. Ideally, the project lead from the PoC stage remains in this role during Implementation. This phase will last for several months, depending on the overall scope.
• Test & Validation – This phase actually occurs as a part of the Implementation phase, and then beyond. An absolutely necessary function that can often be overlooked, Test/Validation is not simply the testing of the application – but setting up deployment scripts, testing scripts and other automation. Once this is setup, huge time and cost savings will result down the road.
• Ongoing Support/Maintenance – A running application does not support itself on its own. Organizations need to account and budget for the ongoing support of the application – which includes customer/user support, as well as bug fixes, additional features and enhancements.