Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
on. Some of these organizations have sites in excess of 5000. At some organizations
concurrent users could be in excess of 10,000.
5.6.1
Technology
The software is developed using Java with the latest technology like Ajax menu, rich
browser user interface, and so on, for the application. The underlying workbench is
an eclipse plug in which business workflows, navigation, menu architecture, feature
turn on/turn off switches, linking roles to features, and so on, are defined which
directly affect the resultant user interface, as the user interface is launched based on
the configurations defined in the workbench.
5.6.2
Infrastructure
Geographically scattered teams were simultaneously working and developing the
application. Some of the teams were from service providers who were working as
offshore extensions of the core development team. Similarly testing teams were
working from offshore locations. But all the code was compiled on one develop-
ment server located in the United States. There is an automated smoke testing
application using cruise control. Whenever any code is submitted to the develop-
ment server, cruise control runs automatically and compiles the new code with the
existing code base. If the new submitted code breaks the build, then cruise control
throws a fail message and generates an error message, which it sends to registered
e-mail addresses. Once the code breaks, the developer who checked the code in is
also sent an automated e-mail containing the error and code break message. The
developer then works to fix the problem and rechecks his code on the server. his
process continues until a clean code is checked in and no error occurs and code
compiles successfully. The error message will also be displayed on the online status
page of cruise control. If the new code compiles cleanly with the existing code base,
then a success message is thrown by cruise control.
For version control, CVS (Perforce) system is used. Whenever a new version of
the software application is started, a new branch is created in the version control
system. At any time there are more than 20 active branches and versions of the
software. They have had more than 9 major and 90 minor releases of the software
application since the application development started.
5.6.3
Testing Resources
For testing purposes UAT (user acceptance testing), pre-UAT (pre-user acceptance
testing), and local builds are deployed on different machines. On any branch of the
application, somewhere between 5 and 35 developers, project managers, business
analysts, and software testers were working simultaneously.
