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Dirican creates industry-leading applications and systems.Our clients
use the systems we build to increase their operational efficiencies, differentiate
their product or service offering in a competitive environment,
and to analyze
their current business.
Dirican's development approach is built around our staff teams. We
have a robust and efficient development methodology, covering all phases of a
project's lifecycle from requirements through construction to maintenance. We use
only staff developers, not contractors, to ensure that our developers use a shared
development process and set of coding standards. This lets us produce high quality,
easily maintainable systems that our clients can depend on for years to come.
With decades of experience creating
information systems, Dirican's staff has the technical and project
management experience to be a major
ally
in achieving your
business and technology goals.
The systems we build range in scope from
four man-weeks to
multiple man-years.
Partner Relationships
Dirican's business practice is characterized by
long-term relationships with our
clients. We work to ensure that the
applications we build not only produce immediate
results, but are also scalable, in order
to meet our clients' evolving needs. We
develop systems that compliment our
clients' long-term strategies. We are proud that
our clients consider Dirican to
be a part of their team and
consider us a
valuable, contributing partner.
Dirican Teams
We approach each project with a team methodology. By using
teams, we can ensure that the facets of a project - design, integration,
management, construction, testing, and documentation - are handled by individuals
with appropriate expertise. Team members are full-time staff who are committed
to Dirican's development methodology and to long-term relationships with
our clients. A typical team for a web project will consist of a:
Project Manager |
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The Project Manager serves as the client liaison from conceptual design and
requirements through system delivery with the rest of the Dirican team. |
System Architect |
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The System Architect designs the primary features of the system - user
interfaces, data flow and storage, reporting, and technical platforms. |
Database Administrator |
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The Database Administrator designs the data model for the
application, creates and implements the physical database, and constructs
supporting functionality like triggers, stored procedures, and
backup/replication routines. |
Application Developers |
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The Application Developers build the
system - the user interface screens, reports,
and processing logic. |
The Dirican Toolbox
Dirican uses tools with a high level of functionality that are strategically
important to our clients. In addition, Dirican uses development tools that are
actively supported by the vendors that create them and by those that will be players
in the future of the Internet.
We stay abreast of new technologies and
have recently added MenIB WebSphere
to our suite.
Internet Systems |
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We build our web servers around Windows NT,
Apache Web Server, and Microsoft's
Internet Information Server. We use Ocular or Microsoft SQL servers as
database engines. The languages
and protocols we use include Visual Basic, Java,
EJB's, Java Servlets, JSP, Active Server
Pages, COM+, HTML, DHTML,
XHTML, JavaScript, VBScript,
VBA, XML, ActiveX, and UML. |
Traditional Database Systems |
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Our database applications are based on the Microsoft Office
suite, generally Excel or Access, enhanced with Visual Basic.
For larger
systems, we will use Visual
Basic for the client front end and SQL server as the data
management back end. |
Development Methodology
We use a formal specifications process to:
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Understand what is our client's business needs are.
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Help our client work through the details of the design.
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Ensure that the system will meet our client's needs.
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Ensure that all involved parties
have a clear understanding of the system
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Construct the application efficiently.
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Develop a test plan.
The sections in our specifications document for
an Internet or intranet system are:
Mission Statement |
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proposed system's overview
including purpose,
technology, and users.
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Page Map |
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A diagram showing all the pages in
the application and how to navigate from page to page. |
Page Details |
| The data
that is displayed on each page,
the links from the page, and
all entry
fields and validation. |
Entity-Relationship Diagram |
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The tables used in building the application and how they relate to each other. |
Use Cases |
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high-level and expanded use
cases detailing actions
taken by every user of the
system and appropriate
system responses. |
Business
Rules |
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The business logic, transaction posting,
and exceptions. |
System Management |
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The plan for administering the system, maintaining
lookup tables,
utilization reporting, analytical reporting. |
Quality Control
We are passionate about writing high quality, easily
maintainable code. Software system design is the foundation for any system and
is an area where Dirican excels. We carefully review the design of an
application before we write even a single line of code. This design phase is
vital to the project's success, as it has been well documented in our industry,
that each $1 spent in the design phase can save $3-5 in the construction and
implementation phases.
Coding Standards |
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We have an extensive set of standards for all the platforms we
use, encompassing application design, module granularity, global object, commenting,
naming, and error handling. We ensure that all our developers use a similar
style to facilitate group development and maintenance. |
Design Reviews |
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We carefully review the design of an application before we
write a line of code. Many flaws in a application can be
avoided inexpensively at this stage. We prototype all screens
to ensure that the application
is consistent with the
specifications. |
Code Reviews |
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We use a formal structured code review process, complete
with checklists and
multi-person inspections, to ensure that the code
adheres to standards and
application performance is as expected. |
Testing |
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We unit test all modules and work with our customers to
develop a comprehensive test suite for the entire application to maximize
application quality. |
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