Increasing Proficiency of Business Analyst Professionals

A Case for Online Agile Software Development Process

Discover how a unique online collaborative solution with automatic software code generation capabilities can help you win software modernization projects more easily

The shift to the cloud is inevitable, and most organizations will move toward a mix of private (in-house) and public (remote) clouds.

To build a comprehensive cloud-based offering, organizations need to quickly develop new cloud-based software and modernize any software based on older technologies and hardware that continues to provide core services.

These legacy applications, like other intangible assets, are hard to emulate by competitors, which is why they represent key differentiators and a source of competitive advantage. Typically, a significant investment in intellectual capital has been made in legacy systems over time.

However, new software development and software modernization projects are taking too many analysis, design, development and QA cycles. Poor time-to-market combined with prohibitive development costs are slowing down most organizations.

In this rapidly changing situation, there are great opportunities for business analyst professionals who can propose resourceful modernization solutions at a fraction of the initial development cost.

Software Modernization Using a unique Online Agile Software Development Process

At AZUR Group, and over a ten years period, we have found that to reduce software development cost and deliver high quality software quickly; we needed to provide our business analysts with an expert online collaborative solution to support our IT services.

AZUR Group is now introducing to a wider audience XI-Factory (www.xifactory.com) for business analyst professionals. XI-Factory has been designed to support an online agile process. The agile software development methodology is based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between cross-functional teams located anywhere in the world. This methodology is well suited for distributed software development, especially across many time zones.

A new approach to software modernization thus relies on the increase efficiency of business analyst professionals using a distributed and automated Agile software development process, further strengthened by a new class of online technology innovations.

The main advantage is that customer teams of subject matter and IT experts are getting involved with our teams of IT experts trough a unique collaborative process to maximise communication. Using XI-Factory, all involved teams can much better synchronize their efforts by securely designing and validating online software requirements, data models, functional models, analysis documents, prototypes, and much more…

XI-Factory major features and benefits:

  Collaborative process

To involve business analysts, stakeholders, architects and developers around the world

   Software Analysis and Design

Of data and functional models, use cases, requirements, test scenarios with test steps, and change requests

Automatic import

Of your old software data models from ODBC data sources

   Generates online a working software prototype

To quickly try and validate it with business users

   Generates software prototype source code

Source code is made available for developers at each iteration cycle

   Buy your software prototype source code

Great value at a low price; only 1/10 of the manual development cost.

XI-Factory delivery process is relying on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform to provide software releases in development, testing and production phases.

XI-Factory implements and automates a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to ease the automated migration of legacy business software into new sets of modern technologies and cloud-based platforms. In our experience with numerous prior customer projects, XI-Factory can quickly and iteratively generate 40% to 90% of the software source code (N-Tier architecture: Silverlight, WPF, or HTML5/jQuery; .NET, DBMS code, and tables), depending on the level of complexity of the software being built.

And because of XI-Factory high level of productivity, we are able to compete against overseas outsourcing economics.

Model-driven code generation provides the ability to generate prototypes during design, which allow customers immediate visual feedback regarding their application prior to development. Source code generation decreases a project's defect count because generated code is more consistent and less error prone than hand-written code. Increased project predictability comes with the standardization that a code generator provides and can additionally lead to decreased maintenance cost.

 

XI-Factory Design Interface for Business Analyst Professionals

Conclusion

Organizational change is not optional to keep pace with business. All organizations, at one time or another, face essential modifications to some aspect of their business. Major analysts firms are stating that public and private spending in cloud computing will increase exponentially over the next few years, resulting in an available jobs boost of million positions worldwide. There is an explosion in both the use of cloud computing and the demand for experts to assist in the mass migration to cloud.

Business analysts can prepare themselves to adapt successfully to a more rapidly changing business environment by embracing new technology. Increase your speed. Customers value speed in providing services and are sometimes willing to pay extra for a quick response.

Business analysts who are fast and flexible generally reduce costs by minimizing their consumed time on a project. As a business analysis professional, you need to continuously review how you can reduce the time spent on work, either in increments or in quantum leaps. Always look for breakthroughs that will allow you to get more done faster and with fewer people.

We encourage business analyst professionals to try and use for free the XI-Factory’s Online Agile Software Development Process and find out how it can greatly improve your ability to propose and win modernization projects more easily.

Contact us, and tell us about you project and see how we can help you define, evaluate, and deliver software development projects like never before!

Additional resources:

XI-Factory - Register for free

XI-Factory - White Paper

AZUR Group - IATA – IRIS Case Study

Author: Jean-Louis Lalonde, CEO, Eng., M.Eng., AZUR Group

Jean-Louis Lalonde, is the Founder and President of the AZUR Group and has overseen the company’s operations since its inception in 1995. He has over 25 years of experience in software development. He is passionate about software construction automation. He is a graduate in Automated Production Engineering from the Université du Québec, École de Technologie Supérieure. He also holds a Master’s degree, MEng., in System Technology Engineering from École de Technologie Supérieure and École Polytechnique de Montréal, affiliated to Université de Montréal.