Quality Driven Approach

There have been many software design "fads" that preach gospel about how your organization should approach the most important intellectual asset it has. At OpenPrinciple, we believe in the core convictions that have been distilled from the array of software development practices over the past decade. Your designs not only need to be flexible and quickly delivered to the market but built from quality components that can stand the test of time.

Most design methodologies make allowances in the development schedule for testing -- however, the experienced project manager and CIO recognizes that as soon as any external pressure is applied to the delivery schedule, the first thing to suffer is testing. Too often, quality is sacrificed for time to market.

Many software architects, project managers and consulting companies do not recognize that the cost of poorly designed software is not linear, but exponential.

At OpenPrinciple we believe:

• The tendency for software, over time, is to entropy or become more difficult and costly to maintain. The only way to maintain a system undergoing constant change is to have a full suite of automated tests that can be frequently applied to the original code base in order to analyze the impacts of change.
• In the absence of a suite of automated tests, the technique of program reading by stepwise abstraction serves as the de facto standard way developers test and debug code. This technique is neither objective nor measurable and the result is directly dependent on the skill of the individual performing the task.
• Development activities should be measured by quality factors of reliability -- expressed as failure rate and defects per lines of code, historically recorded and evaluated over the lifecycle of the project.
• Source code, no matter how good it may be, is not valid without test cases.

OpenGenesis: A Quality Start

All of our projects are based on modern Java (J2EE) design patterns using Aspect Oriented Programming and Inversion of Control design patterns. Our designs rely heavily on Spring, Hibernate, Struts and other Open Source libraries that reflect the latest in developing clean, well abstracted and truly pluggable Java components.

Getting started with all of these technologies (even separately) can be intimidating for even the most experienced Java developer. There are a dizzying number of ways to set up your projects, and many confusing configuration aspects that require you to plumb together configuration files and write custom scripts for compiling, running, testing, deploying and packaging your applications.

OpenGenesis, our Open Source based framework, allows for the point and click configuration of a new Java project, uniting together the required libraries and configurations in a well structured project skeleton for you to instantly begin development from. Benefits of this approach are:

• OpenGenesis creates a standard project structure, making a familiar project workspace for developers across projects.
• OpenGenesis wires together all of your configuration files for Struts, Spring, Hibernate, and XDoclet.
• OpenGenesis creates a full Ant build scripts with standard targets for project compilation, running unit and integration tests, code analysis, documentation, dependency analysis, and build and deployment tasks.
• OpenGenesis includes our commons library, which includes common classes for out of container testing of data access objects, servlets, business logic classes, struts action classes, EJB components, and JMS.