Professional Documents
Culture Documents
December 2009
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Contents
ISIS: The Way to Your Solution
Iterative Progress
What is ISIS?
Software Development
Best Practices
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Getting started on the right track is the most important part of any project.
ISIS includes best practices in the form of step-by-step guidelines for
analysis, design and implementation to ensure your project benefits fully
from experience accumulated through hundreds of successful consulting
projects.
Iterative Progress
Learn More
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Why reinvent the wheel when our consultants already have the expertise
and resources you need from helping other companies implement similar
requirements? ISIS includes a repository of reusable designs, patterns and
components, as well as starter code and tools, that the consultants draw on in
working with clients.
With services ranging from application assessment, feasibility studies
and prototyping to turnkey application development and maintenance,
IBM experts support your entire project. The ISIS methodology adds
tremendous value to your projects while minimizing both technical and
project management risks. Reduced project risks mean better coverage of the
business requirements by the delivered solution and a better fit between the
need and the solution.
To fully understand what ISIS brings to the table, you need to understand
OpenUp, the core of the ISIS methodology framework.
What is the Unified Process?
The success of your project depends on applying the Unified Process (UP), a
well-defined and well-documented software development process. Invented
by Rational Software, promoted by IBM and used by the Eclipse Foundation
through OpenUP. UP is the de facto industry-standard process for software
engineering. It provides a disciplined approach to assigning tasks and
responsibilities within a software development organization, and is aimed at
producing high-quality software that meets the needs of its users within a
predictable schedule and budget.
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Highlights
OpenUP covers the entire life cycle of a software development project, and
guides the development team through project management and technical
activities. OpenUP also serves as a key source of knowledge by providing
an extensive collection of guidelines, templates, white papers, advice and
examples. ISIS extends this foundation framework by adding the production
phase of an application, thereby ensuring customers end-to-end support
when needed.
Figure 1: The two dimensions of ISIS based on OpenUP: Phases and Disciplines
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Inception Phase: During the first phase, project stakeholders define the scope of the project
and its business case. These are codified as UML use-case diagrams to determine system
requirements. At the end of this phase, all the stakeholders need to agree on the scope definition and cost and schedule estimates. If the project fails to pass this phase, it will be canceled or
significantly changed.
Elaboration Phase: In this phase, team members analyze the projects needs in detail and
define its architectural foundation using the scope definition from the first phase. To accomplish
these objectives, members must have a deep understanding of the entire system. This phase is
critical because upon its completion, most of the systems functionality and architecture has to be
established.
Construction Phase: During this phase, the software is designed, built and tested in iterative cycles. Developers frequently consult with management and customers to get feedback. At the
end of the Construction Phase, the system should be ready to be released.
Transition Phase: In the last phase of development, the software product is distributed to
the user community. The users need to be trained to use the product, and new business processes
often need to be rolled out. At this point, feedback from the users drives a new set of requirements
and the systems long-term life cycle is put into place.
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Highlights
The fifth phase occurs after the system is deployed and addresses the
ongoing support and operation of the application:
Production Phase: Two key application support activities take place during this phase. The
first is application maintenance, during which potential defects are corrected. The second,
which runs in parallel and depends upon the nature of the application, is the implementation of
changes corresponding to the evolution of the requirements within the framework of the initial
solution.
What is ISIS?
ISIS is a tailored version of OpenUP for business
rule and optimization projects. It greatly
enhances the IBM ability to consistently provide
great quality, and deliver projects on time and
within budget.
Inception Phase: IBM offers assessment and scoping services to help customers determine
their goals and needs, scope of work, and cost and schedule estimates.
Assessment: By involving IBM Consultants at the beginning, you make sure that your
project starts on the right track. Based on a standard set of benchmarks, IBM consultants
perform a thorough and in-depth assessment of your business and project objectives, and the
readiness of your IT infrastructure and skill sets for deploying business rule and/or optimization technology.
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Scoping: IBM consultants can help develop a scope of work with practical and realistic
schedules and cost estimates. Since ISIS uses iterative development, scoping also identifies
and prioritizes the system functionality that should be delivered in the different iterations.
Elaboration Phase: During the elaboration phase, we offer a prototyping service to assist
with architecture design, technology selection and basic software design.
Prototype: Reducing technical risks in a project involves identifying and vetting key
issues in crucial areas such as performance, integration and functionality. A prototype, or
proof of concept (POC), is often the best way to choose from among a variety of potential
technical or functional approaches. ILOG has developed POCs for a wide variety of business
rule and optimization problems in many different industries. Using the tools, technologies
and starter code in ISIS, IBM Consultants quickly develops complete POCs.
Construction Phase: The IBM ILOG Application Development service complements your
development team to help them build business rule or optimization modules for your system
cleanly and efficiently.
Transition Phase: After the system is completed, the application is transitioned to your
team, along with documentation, training and initial hands-on support as needed.
Production Phase: Once the application is operational, IBM continues to support you
through source-code maintenance, performance fine-tuning, benchmarking and technology
upgrade services.
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Highlights
Your business and technical teams are deeply involved in selecting requirements with each iteration, in addition to requirements clarification, design review, test elaboration and acceptance tests.
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There is no big bang integration at the end. Instead, intermediate versions are integrated and
validated by users from the start.
The team monitors technical risks through ongoing risk reviews and proactive risk mitigation.
By correcting software errors over several iterations, the system and its architecture become more
robust.
The development process itself can be improved and refined with each iteration.
Manage requirements
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Reduced project costs and delays: Fixing requirement and design errors is
expensive. With effective requirements management, you can decrease these errors early in the
development, thereby cutting project costs and preventing delays.
Improved team communication ISIS facilitates the involvement of users early in the
process, helping to ensure that the application meets their needs. Well-managed requirements
build a common understanding of the project needs and commitments among the stakeholders.
3.
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ISISs iterative approach helps developers to progressively identify components and decide which
ones to develop, reuse or buy.
ISIS contains reusable architectures, frameworks, patterns and designs. An architecture enumerates the components and the ways they integrate and the fundamental mechanisms and patterns
by which they interact.
Concepts such as packages, subsystems and layers are used during analysis, design and project
planning to organize components and specify interfaces.
Testing is organized around single components first and then gradually expanded to include
larger sets of integrated components.
4.
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This provides an important set of test cases that can be used to continuously
control software quality. ISIS also emphasizes requirements tracking and
testing. Bug-free software that does not satisfy the customers needs is
essentially useless!
Performance tests and enhancement are standard parts of the ISIS
construction phase and help deliver scalable applications. ISIS considers
process quality an integral part of software quality. This deals with
the quality of the artifacts, including iteration plans, test plans, use-case
realizations and design models produced to support the principal product,
in addition to the concept of checkpoint gates to review, assess and validate
each major phase of the project.
ISIS applies a test-driven approach to software development. IBM practices
continuous code integration and testing, and tracks requirements and
defects. In many cases, the guidelines define step-by-step tasks for reaching
service delivery.
6.
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Done right each and every time: The step-by-step work guidelines within ISIS ensure
that all consulting projects have access to best practices encapsulating experience from projects
similar in nature and complexity. Optimizing these guidelines, IBM consultants provide highquality design and implementation.
Maximize project agility: The iterative approach imparts the ability to adapt to evolving
business requirements and change requests during the project. Two elementsconfiguration
management and business requirements managementare ISIS best practices that bring significant benefits to solutions.
Maximize ROI: Your ROI is maximized because you not only get the skills and knowledge
of one consultant, but the aggregated experience and skills accumulated by consultants from
hundreds of projects as well. This experience is reflected in the work guidelines and the reusable
project management artifacts and software code that provide a framework to jumpstart your
project.
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Minimize time to payback: Optimally applying our experience and best practices through
iterative development creates intermediate releases of the solution, each delivering additional and
incremental business value and benefits. A particular focus on minimizing such payback (i.e.,
maximizing the ROI of every iteration) underlies the design of the work plan and the contents of the
iterations.
Minimize risks: By utilizing past successes, IBM consultants greatly minimize your risks.
They have access to reusable resources, including design patterns, software components, starter
code and architectural designs and specifications, to ensure that technical risks are minimized,
and to work guidelines and reusable project artifacts to ensure that project management risks are
minimized as well.
Access to ISIS: IBM consultants and project managers make relevant parts of ISIS available during consulting engagements, either partially for short-term projects or completely for
significant engagements. Project managers, architects and technical consultants constantly
update ISIS, making it a focal point for sharing knowledge and expertise for consulting projects
based on IBM ILOG software. It also acts as a large repository of accumulated domain knowledge to enable IBM consultants to tap into the expertise of a worldwide network of professionals.
Access to ISIS artifacts: Relevant ISIS project management and implementation artifacts are made available to customers and partners through the engagement of IBM Software
Services, either partially for short-term projects or completely for major engagements. These
artifacts reduce technical risks and the time needed for designing and architecting, in addition
to the implementation effort. They represent best practices for implementing solutions and
encapsulate experience from solving a broad range of different problems.
Learn More
For more information about IBM Software Services for WebSphere, visit:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/services/
WSW14062-USEN-01