Software Development

Budget and schedule overruns and failure to meet chartered business needs are common to software development... These overruns and failures are due to number of reasons including; not receiving feedback during the development cycle thus impacting adoption and relevance, IT centric solutions that fail to understand and meet business needs, immature processes that fail to capture and document requirements and solution pathways, and distancing developers and development from the business that prevents clear understanding of the business problem being solved.

Cognitive Solutions Microburst Process is a proven and unique development process that blends the strengths of traditional water fall development with that of agile (or rapid) development. The Microburst Process leverages the disciplined solutioning approach typical of traditional development by using process and documentation that showcases Cognitive Solutions Business Process Engineering, System Requirements, and Solution Architecture experience. The Micorburst process also utilizes agile methods to speed delivery, move developers closer to the business and solicit feedback and user understanding early in the development cycle. Cognitive Solutions Microburst Process is the result of this blended method and its implementation avoids the typical pitfalls of development while achieving practical results.

Cognitive Solutions development activities are focused on meeting business needs. We architect our solutions to operate from an enterprise perspective within a Service Oriented Architecture while leveraging Event Driven Architecture within the application.

Projects fail despite the best intentions because they only solicit input from the business at the beginning of the process and after months of isolation deliver a product. This period of isolation prevents ongoing dialogue and understanding of requirements but also alienates the business user, preventing the opportunity for user feedback, user understanding, and user adoption. Rather than a “big bang” theory of system development and deployment where constituents may wait for many months to years to see the finished product, Cognitive Solutions believe that the constituents should be actively involved in “qualifying” the system into the real world production environment. Cognitive Solutions Microburst Process utilizes “microbursts”, or the rapid development and prototyping of to-be delivered functionality that allows end users to visualize and experience how they, their colleagues or downstream users would interface with and produce business results from the proposed system solutions. These “microbursts” demonstrate to the constituents, stakeholders, and sponsors, how the solution might work to solve their business needs and encourage buy-in from active participants in the design process (rather than bystanders).

Cognitive Solutions Microburst structured process provides the clearest understanding of the stated business needs and results in development that meets those business needs.