The business of IT
Business and information technology are so fully integrated that the distinction between the two has just about disappeared. This has been true for quite some time in the typical IT‐driven markets (finance, e‐commerce, online payments), but with the rise of the smartphone and NFC technology this trend has also reached the retail and event markets. Today, business innovation invariably demands the creation of new software products and services.
Chess iX offers an integrated set of product development services to transform your new business concept into actual software products and operational services. Our world‐class software development center offers integral application lifecycle management– consultancy, software development and operational support – to deliver innovation right at your doorstep. Our experience and technical capabilities make us the ideal technology partner for supporting your business case.
Fit for change
Developing new software products is an important and exciting part of business innovation, with the ultimate goal of creating software that can be used to deliver services to your customers. To do that, software should not only provide the proper functionality (‘fit for purpose’), it should also run reliably and fast (‘fit for use’).
But most of all, software should be ‘fit for change’; during the course of its lifecycle it needs to constantly adapt to your changing business, pivoting along with your business case. Well‐designed software can be reconfigured and repurposed almost indefinitely, which is crucial when it needs to support a multi‐year business case in an ever‐changing world.
Making software fit for change is a matter of technical quality. Creating adaptable software requires expertise, experience and a dedication to quality that goes beyond simply fulfilling user requirements – it requires thinking ahead.
From concept to product to service
The Chess iX approach to software development carefully balances the flexibility of modern development methodologies with the governance required to manage change and guarantee results. Every project, regardless of whether it is a fixed‐scope or agile development, starts with an intensive workshops phase. During this phase the core development team comes to understand your business case, and delivers an initial design, development approach and project plan.
The workshops include all possible stakeholders, such as the sponsor and the user organization but also the system architects and maintainers of the application. Our design philosophy favors simplicity over complexity whenever possible, resolving the needs of all stakeholders in an elegant functional and technical architecture.
With every design step from business case to source code we look critically at the requirements and underlying
assumptions, and make sure they are explicit and can be validated afterwards. Just as an application’s low‐level design is validated by creating unit tests, and its functional design is the basis for functional testing, so should the initial business requirements be used to create testable,
quantifiable test cases for a product’s ultimate use. Incremental and agile project methodologies provide a structured environment for such iterative business
development, making sure your investment is creating value during initial development.
Tools of the trade
As professional software engineers we are
constantly evaluating and improving our
development processes and supporting
tools to deliver quality software. During
our 15 years of experience in enterprise
Java development we have been at the
forefront of technology, and have created
a strong portfolio of products created from
a masterful blend of (open source)
technologies.
Our development environment and
technology stack are carefully designed,
tailored to the specifics of your product
and the demands of your organization.
Made to measure
Over the years Chess iX has created an extensive portfolio of successful projects. Our repeat experiences in developing online payment solutions and NFC‐enabled transactions have resulted in the creation of reusable software components for these domains. Reusing these components in your product design and development is a fast and cost‐effective short‐track to a finished product.
A separate flyer describing the Chess iX components is available.
The three cornerstones of the ALM concept are: • A software design philosophy that guarantees
your software remains fit for use and purpose because it is fit for change – designed with the certainty that business applications need to change as fast as the business they support. • A dedicated “always‐on” development team that
take responsibility for development, maintenance, quality and technological innovation of your product.
• An integrated, application‐centric approach to service management that combines
development, maintenance and service activities to minimize time‐to‐market and total cost of ownership and maximize productivity.
Application Lifecycle Management
The end of an initial product development effort is merely the start of a product’s lifecycle. Our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) services guarantee that your software remains fit for use and purpose, and capable of growing and changing with your business.
Effectively managing change during maintenance requires a flexible maintenance organization, an efficient and knowledgeable development team, and a firm grip on the total cost of ownership during the complete application lifecycle. Our ALM concept consists of a set of services designed to maximize the return on investment of your software by extending its lifecycle almost indefinitely.
Operations and support
Chess iX offers hosting and operations services for the products it develops, offering our clients a one‐stop shop from concept to operations. Our service department, which includes a service desk function, infrastructure specialists and service management, can integrate seamlessly in your service teams and ITIL organizations. By offering both development and operational services we can guarantee a smooth and effective transition from development and software maintenance to operations. Developers and system administrators act in close cooperation during development, and together design software and system architectures that are easy to install, maintain and upgrade.