Case Study

Fortune 500 Title Insurance Company Improves IT Quality with the Rational Unified Process

Service:
Business Process Management
Industry:
Insurance
Engagement:
In-House Mentoring
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Amentra's acclaimed mentoring process improves client's IDL and COM+ skills

Before Amentra

A Fortune 500 title insurance company suffered from increasing maintenance costs for their existing change management and requirements tracking products. The functionality provided by the software did not justify the resources required to support the platform. The insurance company elected to adopt the Rational Unified Process and Rational Suite in order to continue streamlining their business and IT operations. The title insurance company turned to Amentra to implement and customized development methodology based on the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and to mentor the company's employees in the use of this methodology.

After Amentra

  • A standardized software development approach improves software quality, requirements tracking, and component reuse.
  • The updated platform benefits from reduced maintenance fees and requires fewer supporting resources while providing significant enhancements in functionality.
  • Round-trip engineering and visual system design simplify the entire development process.
  • Management reporting capabilities provide stakeholders with detailed insight into business and resource efficiency.

Evolution of the business process

The rapidly growing company realized its need for a standards-based, iterative processes and successfully addressed the shortcomings of its previous development process. Amentra provided expertise in the area of architecting distributed solutions using industry best practices and field-proven design patterns. The new processes effectively reduced scope-creep and helped manage customer expectations while utilizing proven object-oriented analysis and design techniques and maintaining language-independence.

Applied technologies and expertise

Through assignments and hands-on training, Amentra implemented the effective use of Requisite Pro as a requirements manager and document repository. Through examples and workshops, Amentra delivered a standards-based implementation of use cases and supporting diagrams and models. Relying on years of experience, access to specialized knowledge about the methodology, and intense analysis and design sessions, Amentra implemented streamlined processes to identify the most effective way for the client to produce distributed systems based on an n-tier architecture that is scaleable, extensible, and maintainable. Amentra tailored the process to fit the specific needs of the Fortune 500 title insurance company.

Amentra recognized the need to enhance the skill of object-oriented analysis and design for the development team. Amentra also recognized the need to enhance the skill of true interface-based programming via IDL and COM+. The new processes promote the use of software lifecycle best practices across all development teams while still allowing latitude to optimize the process for specific needs of individual projects. The updated platform provides direct support for obtaining a CMM Level 2 certification.

Technologies used

  • Rational Requisite Pro
  • Rational Rose
  • Unified Modeling Language
  • Visual Basic 6.0 Reverse Engineering
  • COM+
  • Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
  • Rational Unified Process (RUP)