Customer:

One of the biggest and most dynamic direkt-banks in Germany (banks with no branches for individual customer services, operating only via Internet).

Project name:

Central client information management system.

Technologies:

Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE), ATG, Oracle, Swing, Spring, MQ-Series, EJB, SOAP, Hessian, FTP, XML over http,  Axis, Ant, Eclipse, Log4j, jUnit, Cruise Control.

Project starting point description:

• mainly for financial reasons the cooperation with previous service provider has been discontinued,
• major problems with systems performance and quality causing end-client dissatisfaction,
• lack of any documentation, lack of unit tests, only way to gain knowledge of the system was through reading source-code, observation of systems behavior and talking to end users,
• planned dynamic growth directly linked with new bank services and the need of upgrading technologies used in the project (database versions, operating systems),
• time to take over the system (care of production environment and 2nd level support) was very short (1-2 weeks),
• version (1.5) containing new functionalities in one of the subsystem has been scheduled for 2 months from the project start,
• concurrently the customer scheduled two new versions of the application (2.0 and 3.0) which were to be released accordingly in 8 and 18 months (major changes including integration of many new functionalities and 2 large bank subsystems),
• tasks were not limited to purely technical areas, additional business analysis of customer needs and consultancy was also requested.

Project tasks:

Development and maintenance of the application with focus on improving performance, stability and quality of existing bank systems.

Consileons tasks:

• requirement analysis,
• creating specifications for requested changes and improvements,
• system maintenance, bug fixing, responsibility for application behavior and stability,
• further application development: adding new functionalities and improving performance and quality of existing services,
• technological analysis targeted to migration to newer and more efficient solutions,
• advise and assessment of other subsystems focused on extendibility and integration capabilities.

Achievements:

• successful taking over a large and mostly undocumented system in a very short time period (1-2 weeks for first patches),
• delivery and integration of new system versions (current version is 5.x), including integration of two other systems from banks purchased by the customer,
• system is maintained by Consileon from 2004 until today, customers satisfaction from our services practically guarantees that the system will be maintained by Consileon also in the future,
• quality improvements through evolutionary refactoring (even though the project was focused mainly on new functionalities with each version we were able to improve the quality of existing code),
• major performance improvements – currently the system has more than three times more end-users than in 2004 with a considerable speedup (mainly through architectural changes),
• thanks to near-shore cooperation model considerable system development and maintenance cost reduction.