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.
Custom Development
June 19, 2008
Custom Web and Windows application is our bread and butter. Each of our consultants has over 10 years of experience in the many areas of software development, specializing in the Microsoft technology stack (.Net, SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS) as the core and utilizing numerous open source tools around the periphery as part of our ‘Continuous Build and Deploy’ approach.
Perhaps the most important aspect of our development approach is our ‘Keep It Simple’ principle. Adhering to this has enabled us to deliver supportable and maintainable solutions over and over again.
Our toolset allows us to deploy a team in-house with our clients and be productive within hours, or operate offsite and deliver daily releases that can be tried and tested by the client in a shared ’Integration’ environment.
Our ability to integrate continuously via regular deployments of unit tested code are at the heart of our methodology - read more here
If you would like to discuss your development requirements with us, complete our CONTACT FORM.
Quality Assurance - QA all the way!
June 15, 2008
I am amazed at how often organisations will not place a strong enough focus on QA. For the small amount of time spent on this task there are a number of major benefits. These include:
- Bugs can be found earlier, where it is much cheaper and quicker to fix them
- It is easier to enforce coding standards to give the code base a common style and pattern usage.
- Poor programming techniques or inadequacies such as not sufficient unit tests can be fixed earlier.
Whilst it is probably a good idea to not go too overboard with extremely strict QA enforcement, I believe that every line of code developed should be reviewed, or walked through with someone other than the developer of that code. To help with this goal, our SRUM methodology again comes in very handy. This is due to the short 2 week sprints in which we develop. It means QA’s are occuring frequently thoroughout the development cycle, and prevents it all having to occur at then end, with the various issues that that entails.
Deployment Process
June 4, 2008
A major benefit of using a build and deployment process is that it simplifies deployments and ensures consistency of code through all environments, from development and test environments right through to the production and disaster recovery environments.
The code base is deployed with a single-click approach where the application, version number and environment is specified. Because there is little to no manual intervention you can be assured that all evironments with the same version will have the same code.
Enterprise Reporting
May 28, 2008
After conquering the challenges of the Operational Data Store (ODS) our next logical hurdle was always going to be dealing with the inevitable Reporting requirements that would follow. To make things more complicated there always seems to be more than one ODS involved, as well as numerous legacy data sources that need to be brought into the picture.
We have been fortunate enough to be able to work with the some excellent Data Architects and have refined our approach over the last few years, helping us pick the RIGHT SOLUTION from the numerous options that alway seem to present themselves.
ETL Components
May 28, 2008
Buildmasters have been involved with moving data from A to B for a number of years and have seen all manner of ETL architectures and designs. One thing we have learnt is that no implementation is ever the same, however there are a series of common principles that should be applied in any ETL project in order to guarantee success and avoid delivering something into production that is a monster to support. Read more
Build Process
May 28, 2008
The heartbeat of any Buildmasters project is our continuous build process. This combination of technologies allows a team of developers to develop and unit test the code confidently and in isolation whilst the entire process of integrating the completed components is automated on our ‘Build Machine’.
Each time a developer checks in a piece of code the Build Machine detects the change in our Subversion Source Control System and kicks off an automated build of the entire project using Visual Build Pro. We follow a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach, which means that each code component that is checked into source control is accompanied by a number of unit tests also. The automated build compiles the code for the new component and the unit tests and then runs the tests. Read more
