Architecture & Auditing

Xebia's IT Architects provide consultancy in enterprise architecture, auditing reviews, technical guidance and project support. Xebia clearly differentiates itself from larger, more generic systems integrators by offering specialized services and building a relationship of trust and respects with its clients. Our focus on the client relationship and our specific knowledge, typically allows Xebia to expand the co-operation with customers into its specialist service areas.

Agile Architecture: think big, act small

Two major pitfalls in typical software development projects are the architecture process and the architect's level of experience. The architecture process often consists of one or more architects relatively disconnected from developers and business. They try to predict the future at the beginning of a project, often resulting a lot of friction with project management and developers that have to deal with and adjust to the day-to-day situation and requirements. The consequences are the ivory tower or police agent architects, uncomprehensible complexity, problems in production and a mismatch between stakeholder and customer concerns and the delivered solution. What usually happens is that the product ends up not being built according to architecture. In a best case scenario, the architect is forced to make costly adjustments to his design. The problems become even greater when architects think too far into the future or suffer from a "not invented here" syndrome.

Xebia believes that effective and efficient architecture is created "just in time" and "just enough". A Xebia architect combines the ability to see the broad picture, a long term vision and hands-on experience in development. The main focus is to address architectural concerns of product that is to to be delivered first. Xebia architects embrace any new insights during the project and make changes accordingly. This way of thinking will fit in any process, but it fits perfectly in an Agile software development process. Xebia also believes that architecture must be based on a business case, on business needs, and on business concerns. This also implies the non-existence of "silver bullet" solutions. Each situation is different and needs to be treated as such, plus the focus should be on design, communication and facilitation of the architecture process. The creation of architecture is not an architect's privilege, architecture becomes so much more effective when the organization and all developers are involved.

The result of Xebia's approach is:

• Project management experiences the architect as a facilitating partner that brings real value
• Project management sees architecture as flexible and able to adjust to changing requirements and changing budget
• Developers become active supporters because they are directly involved
• Architects are not spending enormous budgets on creating extensive documents that prove to be of less and less value as the project progresses
• Architects are involved throughout the project and will be testing the architectural description and removing risks at an early stage

Xebia audits improves your project confidence

80% of all IT projects fail, are delivered too late, cost too much or lack the required functionality. Xebia can help you increase the overall quality of your projects and save money with four types of audits. Each of these audits is tailored to a specific phase of your project. Together, they cover the full project life cycle. Each audit type can be customized to your requirements. And during a project, one or more audit types can be used to target and measure specific areas of interest.

Discovering and correcting issues in time improves the overall quality of a project and saves money on both short and long term. On short term, because issues discovered can be corrected immediately while projects are under development. This increases the chances of project success and it saves money for expensive reworking. In the long run, discovering recurring issues within projects and finding solutions to them also helps avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. This increases the quality of work across projects and saves a lot of money.

Xebia has a wealth of audit experience in large, complex environments based on Enterprise Java, XML and integration technology. Xebia uses a generalist/specialist approach backed up by a QA consultant. The generalist focuses on the functional details (requirements, functionality, architecture, structure) and has overall responsibility for the audit. The specialist focuses on the technical details of an audit (technology, code, check lists, best practices). Generalist and specialist share the same technical background, which allows them to work efficiently and in support of each other. The QA consultant is an experienced auditor who can be consulted during the audit and performs peer reviews on audit deliverables.

SOA and Integration done right delivers business value

Most enterprises are already familiar with SOA and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and a lot of the larger companies are implementing SOA. Unfortunately, all too often the SOA promise of reusability of resources, interoperability and flexibility of enterprise systems is not delivered or is overshadowed by organizational and technical problems, such as:

• The business is not involved; SOA is something of IT department
• Projects experience SOA as unecessary and overly complex
• Investments in new products and architectural fundament are huge
• The business must wait too long before any advantages are paying off

SOA brings agility to organisations. Xebia believes that the SOA and EAI should be introduced in an Agile way, with the focus always remaining on business value and business goals. Some of these can already be achieved after the first steps of the migration process. SOA should not the goal in itself, but the architecture style to achieve business value. Xebia helps you to define a business case for SOA and a definition of requirements. Both are necessary drivers for delivering real business value.

Xebia believes that success of SOA depends on the ability to manage SOA yourself. Xebia SOA consultants participate actively in knowledge transfer by facilitating the learning process with workshops, knowledge exchange sessions, presentations and masterclasses.

Xebia SOA and Integration consultants can help you:

• In defining the business cases based on SOA principles
• Structure the integration effort by setting up an integration or middleware competence centre, making your investments last.
• By guidance and definition of SOA and Integration architecture

Xebia specialists have detailed knowledge of many technologies used for implementation (like Enterprise Java, XML, web services, brokers, ESBs) and the relevant methodologies and paradigms (like event-driven architecture and BPM).

Performance problems result in loss of business

Performance and stability problems will most likely result in loss of business.
Three examples to illustrate this loss:

1. A web shop where the customer has to wait for half a minute in the process of ordering a product. It takes less time for this person to browse to the shop of a competitor and become a customer there
2. A stock trading system that becomes unresponsive during peaks in trade. Trades cannot be made when this is most needed
3. A Telco that acquires more customers than anticipated. Its systems are not able to deal with the increased amount of usage. This results in customers regularly not being able to use their phone, or their messages becoming delayed by hours. Customers lose trust or patience and switch to the competitor

We all too often see that our competitors are solving symptoms by adding hardware or making many assumptions, thus ending up in endless trial-and-error loops. Xebia performance experts have manifested their ability to effectively analyse the application itself together with infrastructure and pinpoint and solve the root cause of the problems.

Security should be integral part of your software development process

Security is one of the most important qualities of a Enterprise Java application, and they are typically used for public websites or back office processing. However, in most Enterprise Java projects, the implementation of security is postponed until the end of the project. This is partly caused by the misconception that in Enterprise Java, security can be added once the application is deployed. Another important reason is that most projects are primarily focused on delivering functionality.

Xebia believes that security should be an integral part of the software development process. Xebia can help you secure your applications by providing different security services, focussed on a specific phase of a project:

• Security policy and requirements
• Enterprise security architecture
• Application security design
• Enterprise Java application-level security audit
• Black-box and crystal-box penetration testing
• Application server hardening.