METHODOLOGY

Besides the BelBC team, the company always applies to the services of outside specialists so that it can quickly strengthen the project group with highly-qualified developers.

The process of development, implementation and follow-up is iterative i.e. goes through several stages that makes it possible to create a product that meets the requirements of the customer to the full extent.

Methods of development

At the beginning of the project our programmers suggest the customer should approve the documentation that is compiled considering the sphere of his business, they also give the information about possible technologies of devising the particular project and hardware. BelBC technical specialists model and test several approaches in order to determine which meets customer business requirements and system requests best of all. After this procedure the customer chooses the most suitable variant of the project realization (pointing out the positive and negative sides of the task). This choice includes projects of user’s interface, as well as variants of software/hardware implementation. Iteration approach helps to plan the technical and financial aspects of the project more effectively. As the iteration has been approved all the requests, that influence the cost and deadline of the project, are being stored and planned to pass in the following iterations.

Each of the following iterations adds a certain amount of functional features and specific details to the system. That is why the customer can follow the system development more closely.

After we have developed a completely functional product that meets the customer’s requirements, deployment at the customer’s enterprise takes place, teaching of the staff, support and updating of the information product. After the system has been installed at the customer’s servers BelBC specialists will teach the users of the system.

It should be noted, however, that the customer has a possibility to learn the first versions of the software. Such iterative methods of system application help us to react to the customer’s remarks and make the necessary changes at the next iteration of the devising process.

The following working out of the system with the releasing of its new versions takes into consideration the users’ requests and is fulfilled on the basis of tracing the functioning of the system and its applications.

The usage of special management and control system allows us to gather requirements for changes and product modifications, estimate them, plan the realization of the requests and control the quality of their realization.

Methods of testing

The process of testing in BelBC company is fulfilled according to the Rational Unified Process (RUP) principles. The task of software testing is placed upon a special group consisting of test-designers and testers.

The main tasks that are fulfilled while testing are the following:

• preparing of the test-plan and defining the strategy of testing;
• risk evaluation, determining risk areas while testing;
• creation of testing procedures and evaluation criteria;
• evaluation of testing results;
• evaluation of test confidence;
• decision making on correspondence of the product to its specification.

In cases of making any changes in the product on the client’s requests or appearance of new product versions, the testing is repeated in order to check the software at work with amendments to the previous version and also following any possible conflicts of applications with the old versions.

Besides, for evaluation of efficiency and effectiveness of the product, compliance testing is fulfilled. It is based on real data copies and usually going through the following stages:

• working out of testing programme and its coordination with the customer;
• creation of demonstrative testing;
• product installation on the testing platform of the customer;
• fulfilment of testing and results evaluation;
• keeping of testing logs.

The decision of conformity and non-conformity of the product to the specification is made on the basis of the testing logs. By the results of demonstration testing the following characteristics of the software are estimated:

• accuracy of business-cycles functioning;
• productivity of the system;
• fail-safety of prolonged operations;
• system behaviour in stress situations such as disconnection, interruption of unfinished transactions, equipment failure and etc.
• prevention of failure functioning under the influence of invalid or corrupted data
• integrity of data storage.