Design Philosophy:
Our philosophy is smart design: this means that it's model based and living within a toolset rather than printed documents. Below is a range of methods we use with our various clients.

Model-Based Design Approach:

Why do model-based design? Why spend time drawing pretty pictures? The client wants a working system, the developers want to start cutting code, but then the designers want 6-months to write documents?

Model-based design replaces the need for weighty design documents. Using a standards-based methods it allows users, developers and testers who can each be on different continents, speak several languages and operate across multiple time zones to understand a design without ambiguity.

UML:

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is considered the de-facto standard modeling language adopted by agile SOA-based delivery projects. The mix of a rule-based graphical models and associated textual business descriptor delivers a powerful, rapid to develop, iterative-friendly approach.

Our style is to work within the OMG standards for UML using tools that best fit your organisation. We have experience with a range of vendor tools, from the enterprise level (IBM Rational Rose), low cost (Visual Paradigm) through to open source (StarUML). The objective is to rapidly design and deliver tangible benefit either as part of a large development programme or as a stand-alone piece of analysis.

BPMN:

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard graphical notation for presenting business processes in a workflow. Again this is a industry standard maintained by the OMG, which is ideal when engaging offshore or remote development teams.

Adopting a Business Workflow definition approach is ideal for development projects where there is a dependency on human interaction. So we would typically use fully integrated design / development tools (e.g.BEA AquaLogic, Tibco Business Studio) when developing web-based order systems, self-service applications, rule-based load decision engines etc.

Data Modeling:

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) modeling supports UML class diagrams by designing database entities, columns, primary key and foreign key relationships. This accelerates the transition from an abstract object model into physical database build. Alternatively, automating the reverse engineering an existing database into an entity relationship diagram can be used to cost-effectively re- integrate undocumented legacy systems.