Fractal

Fractal is our own open development process, which has evolved from the best technqiues and practices we have found.

Our emphasis is always on delivering systems that the business wants to use and that are easily maintainable from day one. To achieve this we have developed a repeatable process, which we can use with both business people and developers, greatly improving communication throughout an organisation. This has enabled our clients to gather requirements from the business, which the devlopers can quickly and easily understand, thereby facilitating their delivery of systems which the business actually want.

If you would like to know how we can use Fractal to help you then please phone us on +44 1249 815081 or mail us at more@oig.co.uk

Not only is Fractal a repeatable process itself, it is also repeatable from business modelling through to system development, ensuring both continuity and seemless delivery. Hence the name Fractal !

Fractal starts with business modelling, using a variety of knowledge elicitation methods, brain-storming and meta-planning techniques to identify an organisation's core business concepts. The concepts are then analysed, encapsulated and specified as discrete units of software, ie components. Thereby enabling the business concepts to be directly represented in software. This part of Fractal takes a participative design approach, and as much as possible of the work is carried out in structured workshops, involving the business and developers. We start with a relatively small part of the business and then gradually bring in other areas. As such Fractal is an incremental approach, but it is also immediately productive, allowing a client's key objectives and core business to be rapidly driven-out. Our experience has shown that object technology (OT) is particularly good at enabling business concepts to be directly represented in software. So over the years we have used various OO methodologies and OO modelling, such as OMT, Booch, HOOD, Coad/Yourdon, James Odell (Ptech) and Shlaer-Mellor and now within Fractal we use UML modelling.

From here Fractal takes a component-based development approach. Using the specifications the components are either built or bought. Next their reusability needs to be tested, the components reviewed and refined before establishing them as an organisation's core robust components.

Application development is use case driven and involves plugging together the components to provide the required business processes. Requirements gathering is again carried out in a participative manner in short meetings or workshops involving both the business and developers. The workshops make use of meta-planning and CRC cards and the output is captured in use case models. The result is a truly agile process, decreased time to delivery because of reuse and well-accepted, easily extensible and highly maintainable systems.

Would you like to know more about adopting Fractal ?

We can also tailor Fractal to fit in with your existing processes or to include elements of other processes you may be adopting such as RUP.

If you would like to discuss your specific requirements then please phone us on +44 1249 815081 or mail us at more@oig.co.uk