Company Profile
Hanu Software Solutions Inc. (HSS) is a global consulting and IT services company that provides comprehensive software solutions for various industries, including publishing, finance, insurance, and retail. Headquartered in Monmouth Junction, NJ, with an offshore development center in Gurgaon, New Delhi, India, HSS offers a unique value proposition to our clients. The company believes in providing the highest quality software solutions at a very cost effective price.
HSS offers a wide range of services including business process outsourcing, on-site technical consulting, offshore software development and product lifecycle management. By combining domain expertise with low-cost offshore development, HSS’s offshore delivery model offers customers solutions with cost savings of up to 45%, with improved productivity and faster turnaround time. faster marketing.
Background
HSS’s technology-focused solutions center delivers exceptional customer value through the use of innovative and specialized tools and processes that are unique in nature. This white paper illustrates how Faster.NET, a development framework developed by the HSS .NET Center of Excellence (COE), enables the enterprise’s technology-aligned services organization to deliver exceptional value to its business and technology customers, strengthening its competitive advantage.
The .NET COE: Delivering Agile Solutions on a Microsoft Platform
The HSS COE for .NET aligns with the Microsoft platform and toolsets and delivers business-critical solutions to a variety of business and technology domains. This COE has a collective 200 person-years of IT experience and over 75 person-years of .NET experience. Other key data are:
Staff 45
started 2002
Number of projects executed 30
Rent Gurgaon, India
Faster.NET: The HSS Development Framework for .NET Solutions
The continuous improvement work that HSS has done with the .NET COE has led the company to create a framework for delivering scalable, on-demand .NET solutions to customers in a variety of industries. HSS calls this Faster.NET. Its key elements are:
Pre-assembled and reusable software components
HSS has developed a library of over 100 software components that are commonly used in .NET applications. These components are tried and tested with proven designs and free from critical bugs. Components can be reused as is or with modifications. Reusable components include data layers written in all .NET-based languages, a variety of GUI controls, and security model objects.
In the design phase of a new project, HSS engineers determine which components are suitable for the project. Only the code unique to the app is designed and written from scratch. Building high-quality existing software in this way into a new application saves the customer time and money, and helps ensure quality in the implemented application. HSS does not believe in developing a new solution from scratch for each new project.
A set of reusable engineering tools for speed
The HSS development toolset is an important element of the company’s ability to deliver solutions for many different lifecycles, budgets and timelines. HSS tool set includes:
· Migration tools like VB to VB.NET, C# to VB.NET, PHP to C#. NET, SQL tools to Oracle and others.
Database tools like SQL compare and data scriptors.
Design tools, reverse engineering tools, data migration tools, and many others.
The unique set of reusable tools enables HSS engineers to complete projects quickly and with good quality.
Solution Blue Prints (SBP): a reusable set of architectures
HSS has a reusable set of architectures called Solution Blue Prints (SBPs), ready for common business domain, technology domain, and service domain problems. Like the HSS software components, these architectures have been tried and tested on company projects. Architectures include associated prototypes. Using SBP saves considerable effort in developing, prototyping, and testing software solutions. For example, an SBP was used to design a property management system that the client has been using successfully for over a year.
Qualified and certified engineers
Approximately 60% of HSS programmers have earned internationally recognized certifications, including MCP, MCSD, and JSCP. This percentage is continually growing, a direct reflection of the company’s commitment to employing the most highly trained, qualified and certified engineers. What this means for the customer is superior quality, scalable solutions delivered quickly.
HSS recruits top engineering talent from top universities and puts them through six weeks of rigorous classroom and on-the-job training. HSS also provides ongoing advanced programmer training for all staff.
With these elements, the Faster.NET HSS framework reduces typical application development time by approximately 20% to 40%. The time saved depends on the project, where it is in its lifecycle, and how badly the client wants us to apply the Faster.NET development methodology.
Faster .NET Framework in Action: A Case Study
For a project for which time to market is a critical goal for the client, HSS evaluates the project against its Faster.NET toolset to determine which tools will be most effective. HSS has measures for the effectiveness and impact of the tools. These measurements allow HSS engineers to determine the most effective tools to use on a given project.
As an example, a migration tool enables the company to migrate an existing VB/ASP application to .NET with throughput of 900 to 1,000 lines of code per programmer per day. With this measurement, HSS can estimate the time required to migrate the application.
Leveraging its toolsets enables HSS to achieve development savings at every phase and for every task of a project. The following case study illustrates this.
project needs
A company approached HSS because their web application, written in ASP, was not stable enough. ASP code needed to be migrated to .NET, which required redesigning the application to .NET standards.
Use of Faster.NET tools
The HSS development team increased the time to market for this project by applying Faster.NET tools in the following ways:
Step 1 – HSS engineers used the migration tool to migrate the software to .NET before changing the architecture. Estimators determined that the migration would take approximately 200 person-days, meaning that a four-person team could complete the migration in just two months or, if necessary, an eight-person team could complete the effort in one month.
Step 2: To maximize the efficiency of the redesign phase of the project, HSS creates a related existing architecture of its Solution Blue Print (SBP) library. In this case, the target architecture was overlaid with support for a dual presentation layer (WAP and HTML). The lowest level of this architecture was the database interaction layer.
Because SBPs are already tried and tested, using this SBP instead of developing a new architecture from scratch saved time on prototyping and testing, reducing development time from the nearly 150 person-days it normally requires. a redesign effort in the industry.
Step 3: Next, HSS engineers reviewed their library of pre-assembled components for components suitable for reuse in this application. They chose a data access layer written with VB.NET and C#.NET. This particular component handles transaction support, execution of stored procedures, as well as embedded queries, data readers, and data adapter-based interactions. Also, it has robust exception handling. This component consists of approximately 5,000 lines of code.
Reusing it reduced development effort by 100 people per day, averaging 50 lines of code per person per day of typical coding productivity.
Step 4: Concurrent with the software development effort, HSS QA engineers determined that using the NAnt script-based auto-build configuration could save a considerable amount of compilation and compilation hassle. Consequently, the Visual Studio build engineer created an automated build configuration using the scripts. Scheduled to run automatically, this automated process proactively provided feedback on bad registrations, build issues, and integration issues.
Step 5: The HSS development process includes comprehensive lower level design (LLD) documentation. HSS saves a considerable amount of time in your documentation efforts by using a documentation tool called Ndoc that automatically creates CHM or MSDN style code comments. This tool saved up to 50 person-days that would otherwise have been required to create a 200-300 page document.
Step 6: The HSS QA group took the existing test scripts and modified them for the features and functionality of this application. The QA test group also created an automated test suite using Mercury and Nunit toolsets. HSS was able to run the test cases multiple times without significant additional person-days, ensuring the quality and reliability of the software when it was delivered from QA to the customer.
Completion: The end result was that HSS successfully migrated and re-engineered the system in just 12 person-months of effort. The company implemented the software at the client’s site in 3 months.
Exceptional added value
Just as important as the development time savings described in the case study is the exceptional added value that HSS provided to this customer:
1. This customer was facing enormous pressure from users to do something about the unstable application. The customer’s data center provider was also pressuring the company to upgrade the application to .NET. HSS immediately assisted the client in handling this situation and devised a competitive product and services that met their clients’ requests.
2. The quality and stability of the improvements were tremendous, thanks to the greater inherent stability of .NET architectures, as well as the proven components and architecture that HSS used for this project.
3. During the course of this project, HSS was able to educate the client on the software development lifecycle and development processes, an education that is of ongoing benefit to the client.
4. The user interface (UI) developed by HSS was very popular with the end users of the client and attracted many new clients.
5. HSS provided these services at a very cost effective price. Their .NET COE operates from India and the engineering costs are quite cheap. Development cost savings were close to 70%. These savings were used to enhance the app with new features, giving the customer significant advantages over the competition.
conclusion
HSS is committed to designing, developing and implementing internal processes and systems that deliver exceptional customer value. The Faster.NET framework is an example of HSS’s continued journey in implementing this commitment. COEs aligned with the company’s technology, using internationally recognized software development processes, are capable of providing significant competitive advantages.