The application quality and performance guarantee is a priority for Caja Madrid. In collaboration with the optimisation expert, Optimyth, this financial organisation has moved from reactivity to proactivity and it has established a continuous improvement circle.
Betting on the usage of an application that finally does not meet the requirements set prior to its development can be extremely expensive for an organisation, and not only from the economic point of view but, essentially, from the services quality point of view.
Caja Madrid is totally aware of this reality and, for this reason, they have being working during the past few years along with Optimyth (formerly ALS -Application Lifecycle Solutions Company) to be able to guarantee the quality of their applicatives.
The collaboration between Caja Madrid and Optimyth began in 2004, through Caja Madrid eBusiness, the organisation through whom this financial company launched its platform on the Internet and that finally became part of the Portal area of the bank. Then, Caja Madrid eBusiness contacted Optimyth to improve the Internet application performance available for customers, both private and corporate.
Working with Optimyth, allowed Caja Madrid to identify the bottlenecks that negatively impacted the online service delivery on the Internet office performance. We are talking about open systems and distributed applications built on J2EE under the outsourcing formula by suppliers such as IBM, GFI, Iecisa and Indra.
The initial agreement with Optimyth aimed to find problems and to provide solutions, a task for which Optimyth uses tools of specialised manufacturers in testing and monitoring as Compuware and Mercury Interactive (HP), among others.
As a result of the presentation of this optimisation service to Caja Madrid and other clients, Optimyth detected the need to count on a solution that could provide a complete follow up through integrated and unified data presentation obtained in an analysis. Due to that need, checKing QA was born and includes a set of code analysers.
Objective: the continuous improvement
As a result of the satisfactory results achieved in the Portal area where Optimyth still delivers optimisation services in projects as OI2, the new version of the Internet office; Caja Madrid opened, around 2 years ago, a second working line in the department of Quality, in this case, with the high-priority objective of extending the continuous performance improvement already established in the traditional platforms –the host- to the new ones. The high-priority objective of this new line was to make the performance optimisation interventions in a proactive way, and not just when a problem is found. The director of the department of Quality Management in the Systems and Operations Unit of Caja Madrid, Maria José Álvarez, comments that “the work done with Optimyth guarantees the quality of the applications developed by third parties”.
According to Álvarez the initiative has had a very positive impact in the relations between Caja Madrid and these suppliers. “The aim is not trying to identify problems previous to production, but to transfer the knowledge that could help the supplier to build the application that the client expected from the beginning”.
In the Quality department there are now another two great projects under development with Optimyth: one client facing and another internal. The first project has the objective of “establishing a permanent certification of the technical quality circle, which implies the use of checKing QA solution and tracking and detection tool at the development stage”, according to Álvarez.
The initiative that will represent an investment of around 400,000 Euros, will lead to the creation of a Technical Quality Certification Platform.
On the other hand “we want to use this system, not only with external products, but also to extend it to what we develop internally”, says Álvarez, pointing at the natural evolution of inherited client/server systems that are being rewritten in J2EE. “In the future it is thought that we will introduce the evolution of the offices platform and the tools available on the Internet and the Intranet related to the product commercialisation through alliances into this cycle”.
Thus, the Quality department fulfills a double objective: “on the one hand, we certify the quality of the developments made by suppliers and, on the other hand, we make a continuous follow up of the performance of the traditional platforms as well as of the distributed environments and future services over SOA architectures”.
Optimyth also can be of aid to Caja Madrid in obtaining the CMMI level 4 certification (Capability Maturity Model Integrated) since “it is a quantitative level that requires many metric and data that checKing QA can help us to obtain”. The organisation presents today a level 3 and believes in reaching level 4 at the end of 2009.
Computing, 28th april 09