The world changes everyday...

We are always pleased to associate/integrate your IT people in our development team, at any level related to the skills they can provide. This can reduce the overall cost of developing a new system/project/application for you.

Project Management

Lot of software development projects fail for scope creep, instability, undefined requirements. Our development team has the required experience to warn you of potential pitfalls before they arise. This leads to tremendous cost savings and reflects our ethics : fair business, short-term missions, long-term relationships, articraft’s quality of work.
No project failure has been reported to ASK since 1989. There has been no trial between ASK and its customers since 1989.

Productivity

Latest developments methodologies allow tremendous productivity enhancements, which makes (partial or complete) specific development to compete advantageously with unflexible (in features and/or in costs /complexity) packages.

Example : From C++ to C# : productivity + 1000%, SOA : productivity
by the quality of the produced code and later flexibility to adapt :
X 2 or 3

ASK Projects scopes

We develop from the concept to the operational implementation. Deployment is more and more often left to the responsibility of our customers as they use automated management tools for maintaining standards throughout their whole organization. But we prepare our deliverable solutions to fit your deployment tools.

Testing

Tests specifications are defined by you and ourselves as the final customer doesn't always perceive where the potential problems lie, due to the complexity of nowadays technologies.

We use unit-test strategies and when we can get a budget for, we create simulators to test automatically and exhaustively the combination of all cases as well as workload testing and load-balancing testing.

ASK provides a complete software development lifecycle for you (2/3)

A vision

Getting the right vision of the project, why it has to be implemented, what the goals and the expected ROI are, how it fits to the corporate strategy, its positioning on the market : early-adopter or catching competitors is often neglected. This is a pity in the sense that being conscious of those answers can bring much more added-value to the project for a tiny marginal additional development cost (if any).

Planning & Deliverables

ASK signs for fixed delays. Of course, functional specifications, project schedule and test specification plan have been agreed before between you and us.
Milestones are defined for a common revision of the project at that stage and a documentation process starts. Project development is a 80/20 process: we cover 80% of the needs with 20% of our energy and we spend 80% of our energy to cover the remaining 20%... No mystery, nothing new but at least we are aware of it, which reduces the risks of conflict between parties. Hopefully, with the latest development technologies improving almost each new day (for some details at least), the ratio 80/20 changes in favor of the developers at the cost of following more constraining rules during the development.

By fine tuning, we understand the last details of the implementation as required by the final customer to better fit his expectations as well as some stabilizing actions, which mainly depend on the physical IT environment and configurations.

ASK includes Good (operational) Corporate Governance & Waterproof Checks into your Business Processes (3/3)

Since 2005, all our projects automatically include some new software components, which are tools to sustain SLA levels and good (operational) governance.

* ITSM Domain - Availability Management

ASK_StatusControler Group of functions for Network Monitoring : these
components control permanently the hardware and the software (O.S. and/or
application(s) ! Does it make senses to invest in heavy redundant clusters
with a sophisticated monitoring system when the application itself (often
the most fragile component) is not permanently semantically checked against real your real business logic?

* ITSM Domain - Service Level Management & IT Service - Continuity Management

It's often called the "BAM" group for System & network Activity &
Performance Monitoring. It's a set of indicators regarding the activity and
the performance of the business process, from the hardware (wmi indicators f.e.)
up to the application level (number of transactions per second f.e.)

ASK Business Full Proof/Waterproof Check

We also add to any new project what we call a "Full-proof Check " or "Waterproof Check". It's aimed to check in (almost) real time that all inputs of a business process have been handled fully, correctly and on time as well as fully archived (eventually at different stages of the process, updating some status all along the document workflow).

A Web app to allow end users register the processed tasks ("MarkAsProcessed") when no other way exists. (Specifically, when Back Office applications may / cannot be interfaced)

The task to be achieved by the backoffice is sent to the responsible with an url link. Clicking on the link is enough to confirm that the task has been completed.

ASK also provides "BusinessProcessWatchers". Their role is to semantically check the business processes as a whole or in regard with other related ones. They balance the mutual independance of the SOA components for preserving business consistency.