Absa, one of the main local players in development of innovative software services for the SA financial sector, is improving developer productivity by up to 50% in certain client/server projects.
Through partnering with e-business and application testing specialist, Compuware SA, the organisation is enhancing its client server skills, while ensuring standard development tools are used in its Technology Solutions group.
"Not only are we experiencing enhanced productivity in terms of time taken to accomplish similar tasks, but the quality is up to 60% better," comments Deon Beukes, head of the Competency Centre at Absa Group Information Technology. "We have not had as many integration problems, hand-over has been easier and through using standard tools, the knowledge transfer is much easier and remains within the organisation."
He says a task that would take developers three weeks to complete now only takes hours.
The return on investment (ROI) has also been excellent. "Compuware SA advised we would recoup our investment within three months - it actually took less than that. It`s been a very worthwhile investment in terms of time, costs and multi-skilling our staff," says Beukes.
Commenting on why the organisation embarked on the project, he says: "The client server industry has been rapidly expanding and we needed the tools to enhance our own developments in this sector. We knew it was very important to provide our developers with a set standard and the right tools not only to develop comprehensive solutions but to improve their own productivity." Adam Phillips, competency specialist at Absa, explains that the bank had a development process but no tools to fit in with it.
"We realised if we could solve this and improve programmer productivity, we would get performance gains and therefore a shortening of our development lifecycle, critical in today`s fast-changing, flexible environment," says Phillips.
"Our aim was to enhance our Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Web-based development." Absa implemented Compuware`s NuMega DevPartner Studio, providing them with the tools that enable developers to deliver reliable, high performance software components, decreasing error margins and saving time.
"The client server world is far more complex in terms of integration and not as well defined as mainframe systems, so it can be quite tricky. NuMega DevPartner Studio, however, helps us to deal with these complexities, providing our developers with the proper coding practices that will enable them to understand it much faster," says Phillips.
"NuMega DevPartner Studio is a suite of productivity tools that accelerates the development of distributed and other component-based applications," says Grant Kirk, NuMega account manager at Compuware SA. "It provides a single integrated package that accelerates the software development process, and at the same time increases application quality."
"Compuware`s NuMega DevPartner Studio provides us with three tools in one. It intuitively identifies potential coding problems and standards violations, debugs and automatically picks up errors, providing our developers with the tools to develop and implement software rapidly and effectively," comments Phillips. He adds that with NuMega the learning curve is minimal. As part of the implementation of NuMega, Compuware also provided training. It was important that the developers fully understand and utilise the tools on offer.
"Very few users want to go in blind, they all want to see what they`re using before they start using it," comments Beukes.
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