Business Software Engineering Processes : An Analytics Case Study

Abstract: Using Information Technology (IT) solutions to automate business processes has been the norm for many organizations in recent years. Despite the great benefits an enterprise can reap from adopting such solutions, developing ones own IT solution is not as easy as it might seem. If we take into account the ever increasing complexity of modern businesses and their operating environment as well as the fast pace with which the modern world is changing, development and maintenance of such systems can easily become a daunting task. Many software development processes have been proposed over the years aiming at increasing software projects’ success rates in terms of budget, time and requirements satisfaction. In this project (code named Helium), we propose a simple software development process customised specifically for Customer Value (CV) and we apply this process to develop a novel distributed IT system that automates the main business processes of the company. Our main goal is to reduce the operational costs of Customer Value (CV) and increase its capacity and provided Quality of Service (QoS). The ”start-up” nature of the company is taken under consideration, since it introduces a considerable amount of uncertainty, as well as the fact that the initial set of projects in their project road-map are going to be thesis projects carried out by students and not experienced professionals. The proposed distributed architecture aims at providing maintenance, expansion, performance and scalability benefits. A basic set of measurements, carried out on the implemented system, validate the correctness of our approach with respect to performance and a set of interviews carried out with senior developers and managers validate the importance of the benefits of the process and architecture from a business standpoint.