Development and testing tools

There are literally thousands of tools to choose from in the software development process. That’s why we are constantly trying to improve our development process by adopting development and testing tools and technologies that flawlessly merge in our workflow (sometimes we even improve and tune them up), rather than acquire and introduce everything that gets to the market.

General

Our preferred web-application development platform is Java. We believe it to be a very flexible, yet extremely powerful technology with comprehensive set of useful frameworks and toolkits constantly updated. Among the most important Java frameworks and libraries we employ are Hibernate (for object/relational persistence and query), Spring (application framework), Mondrian (for OLAP reporting), JPivot (for OLAP navigation and drilldown) and many others.

For smaller scale development projects that require quick iterations and frequent rollout we employ Ruby on Rails framework.

Most of our web-applications are powered by Apache Tomcat, which is currently an industry standard application server solution. Some of our project also use JBoss application server solution.

Our Soltex platform easily integrates with any existing database solution. The most common customer’s choice in our projects is Microsoft SQL Server, so we pay close attention to 100% compliance of all our solutions with MS platform. We also have extensive experience in implementing MySQL, Oracle and other databases.

Testing and integration

Our continuous project integration process is built around CruiseControl environment and Apache Ant and Apache Maven tools. It is essential part of our development process that provides source code repository and constant builds with automatic testing.

Important parts of our testing process are Canoo WebTest tool (integrated with CruiseControl), FitNesse testing environment, and Apache JMeter tool used for load testing.

Project management and monitoring

Our approach to project management is that of Agile development. We also take the best from common agile processes like Extreme Programming and Scrum. Therefore we favour open specification discussion powered by Wiki technology (JSPWiki and TWiki solutions as well as others, depending on project requirements).

For large-scale projects, where extensive specification discussions involve large number of people, and when special features like e-forms, polls etc. are required, we employ Drupal content-management platform.

We also prefer open solutions for managing development work: Trac for issue tracking and XPlanner for detailed planning and monitoring of development tasks.

Recently we have adopted a new open-source project management tool called Redmine. We are currently testing and evaluating it as an interesting development project management alternative for Trac and XPlanner.