Services
Bright Ring delivers business value at every stage of the software development life cycle.
Requirements Analysis
What It Is
During this initial phase, the developers learn what exactly the software should do. A company without an in-house development staff typically begins this step by creating and developing a Request For Proposals.
Pitfalls
According to Barry Boehm's Software Engineering Economics, the time required to identify a defect in software after it has been deployed is 40 to 1000 times longer than if it had been found during requirements analysis. Ironically, the companies most eager to get a project done quickly are also the ones most likely to skip important details when writing the RFP. This virtually guarantees that the project will take much longer than necessary.
How Bright Ring Adds Value
Bright Ring's founder wrote his first RFP in 1993, and has answered more than his share since then. Bright Ring can help you write your RFP, shortening the proposal cycle and preventing the most costly errors before they even occur.
Design
What It Is
During this phase, technical architects decide how best to create the program.
Pitfalls
An incomplete design document leaves out details that may seem insignificant, but which can take significant time to develop and test. Any project plan based on this design will necessarily underestimate the time and money required to implement the design. In other words, the project will go over budget and off schedule before the first line of code is written.
How Bright Ring Adds Value
Bring in Bright Ring for a design review to get an independent evaluation of the design documents, ensuring that they have the necessary level of detail without hidden flaws. (According to Boehm, it is 10 to 150 times faster to identify defects during design than after deployment.)
Implementation
What It Is
During this phase, developers code and test the software.
Pitfalls
Bugs! Also, an excessive number of bugs indicates a generally poor implementation, which greatly increases the cost of software maintenance. (Boehm: defects introduced during implementation, if not caught quickly, take between 4 to 100 times as long to fix after deployment.)
How Bright Ring Adds Value
Bright Ring Software has high standards for code and documentation quality. Engage Bright Ring for software coaching and mentoring for your development staff. Good coding practices cut down on expensive errors during development, and lower the cost of maintenance forever afterward.
Testing
What It Is
During this phase, which overlaps the implementation phase, all manner of tests are applied to the software.
Pitfalls
Shockingly, many software development teams claim that they "cannot afford the overhead of testing." When developers do test, all too often they test haphazardly, by hand. If these tests do stumble across a few defects, they do so long after the defects were introduced, when they would have been easiest to fix.
How Bright Ring Adds Value
Bugs are inevitable; testing exposes those bugs before software is deployed. The sooner they are caught, the more quickly they can be fixed. Have Bright Ring set up automated testing suites that test your code continuously from the very beginning of implementation. Bright Ring can write tests while your developers write code, so that defects can be caught immediately, saving you time and money. Code reviews are a crucial part of that.
Troubleshooting
What It Is
Troubleshooting is not generally considered to be a distinct phase of the software development life cycle, although it commonly occurs during testing, deployment, and maintenance.
Pitfalls
Sometimes fixing a bug is the easy part - the hard part is reproducing it, not to mention finding the code responsible for it. A single bug can bedevil a whole team of developers for days or weeks, destroying their productivity. Thread-related problems are among the hardest.
How Bright Ring Adds Value
Bright Ring has intimate knowledge of debugging and profiling tools that greatly reduce the time needed to identify and locate software defects. Bright Ring also has expert knowledge of low-level UNIX tools like lsof and truss/strace that reveal problems with operating system resources. Hire Bright Ring to zero in on your most difficult bugs and allow your technical staff to do the job you pay it to do.