Consulting

If you already have the resources to build your own IT solutions, we can provide key expertise where you need it.

Our consultants can provide advice, mentoring or do part of the work in the following areas:

Process evaluation Process improvement Project management Requirements gathering Architecture and design Programming Testing

Process Evaluation

After a thorough investigation of all aspects of your current software development process, we will provide a report and presentation of the state of your process and recommendations for improvement. We will provide a full report containing a map of the proposed process, including activities, roles, products and tools.

Process Improvement

This service aims to improve your development process and optimize the use of your IT development resources. It can involve an integrated program of process evaluation, seminars, courses, process implementation, mentoring, IT knowledge management, and process monitoring. The end result is an effective software engineering process in your organization.

Project Management

Maybe you have good technical resources but your projects need better management. A project management consultant from ThinkTools will lead your team as an acting project manager or advise your project manager regularly. We are particularly good in applying Iterative Development to ensure that your risks are quickly minimized to get to your project goals through the most direct route.

Requirements Gathering

Requirements gathering is the most important part of an IT project. Mistakes at this point can be hundreds of times more costly to rectify at a later part in the lifecycle. Your ThinkTools consultant can ensure that this part of the project is done right. We have long experience in applying the UML techniques of Use Cases models combined with other pragmatic techniques to give you the best Functional and Supplementary specifications.

Architecture and Design

As outsourcers we have developed architectures for many IT projects and as consultants have helped development teams brainstorm design issues to build effective and resilient architectures. Our approach is that Architecture contains all the really significant elements of the intended system. For a complex system a multi-view approach is necessary. Our architectures consist of many views, each describing the system form a different angle - functional, software, hardware, data, security, etc. We usually express design solutions in UML as part of the design model. We can use tools such as Rational Rose or simply document or diagram editors like MS Word and Visio (TM) depending on the size and complexity of the system.

Programming

Our consultants are experienced in most popular languages, tools and environments.

Testing

We normally do testing within the context of an Iterative process. In this context testing is done not at the end of development, but rather in parallel with development. We can help you setup such a framework as well as do the actual testing and QA.