Tales from the War Room
April 29, 2009
With out 3rd major software release due in 40 days success is really reliant on some pretty effective collaboration between the multiple moving parts that need to come together on the day like one big well-oiled machine. That’s why I’m so glad that we setup our ‘War Room’ meeting. Each morning at 9am 20 indivduals descend on Meeting Room One from their various teams and take stock of progress over the previous 24hrs.
From the top we have : the Delivery Manager, ultimately responsible for the successful implementation of the release into Production; the Project Manager, reponsible for coordinating the campaign and keeping us all revved up; the Test Director and test team leads, responsible for executing 500 test cases with 100% success rates through System Test, Joint System Test and Joint Acceptance Testing; the Trading System BA, responsible for design and development of the BlackRock Trading Platform component; the Data Management System team lead, responsible for the 40+ integration components they feed data throughout the solution; the Enterprise Services team lead, responsible for scheduling of data feeds; the Environments team lead, reponsible for servers, hardware and dealing with the spate of City-wide power-cuts we’ve had recently!!! Finally there’s the ‘Stats Guy’, responsible for compiling an impressive array of graphs and statistics that boil down the infite number of variables that all the other members generate during any given day into something that can meaningfully be discussed in under 45 minutes. Read more
Eagle PACE Development
June 21, 2008
The Buildmasters development Team has two years of Eagle PACE development experience having built the Operational Data Store (ODS) components of a massive front and middle office change program at one of Autralia’s biggest funds management companies. We have applied our Continuous Integration and SCRUM development methodology to great effect, delivering an incredibly robust solution, which includes over 1000 unit tests and a build/deploy environment that compiles, tests and deploys our solution on average 10 times a day.
This implementation of Eagle PACE involved over 80 data interfaces between the ODS, the internal trading, performance and rec systems, external data providers (Charles River, Bloomberg, Factset, S&P) and our outsources back-office service providers (one in Sydney and one in Shanghai).
We have refined the development of Eagle PACE uploader and exporter components to reduce lines-of-code and provide a robust suite of unit tests to ensure effective QA. We have also built a comprehensive ETL framework, allowing us to build generic re-useable interfaces to Eagle PACE.
Though the project has been a considerable challenge due to complex requirements and dependencies, the resulting system is now running in production 24/7 processing market data, portfolio positions and transactions and security details for an increasing volume of investment portfolios.
