How can our company:

• deliver products, which meet customer needs?
• deliver these products within specified timeframes?
• make teamwork more effective?
• deal with changing customer requirements?
• raise the quality of the products?

These questions and many others lie within the scope of project management. Ractors realizes that just having outstanding programmers is not enough to produce high quality products and services. We understand that it is crucially important to pay much attention to project management, to quality control and to the proper organization of software processes.

We at Ractors consider project management to be one of our company’s strong points. The fundamental parts of Ractors’s project management process are described below.

Management team

All our project managers and team leaders have strong development backgrounds and comprehensive knowledge of modern software technologies. Most of them have 4-5 years of project-leading experience. Such experience allows them to make prompt and sound decisions. The project management staff’s high level of communication abilities facilitates day-to-day interaction with the company’s customers and allows the staff to understand our customers’ needs more efficiently.

Ractors also provides regular on-site training and seminars for our management teams.

Software Development Process

The Software Development Process in Ractors is based on the Rational Unified Process. The Rational Unified Process helps to describe the processes involved in software engineering. It provides a disciplined approach to assigning tasks and responsibilities within a software-development organization and includes most contemporary advancements in software engineering (the object-oriented approach, the controlled iteration development model, etc.). RUP’s goal is to ensure the development of high-quality software that meets the needs of its end-users, while having been developed within a specific schedule and budget. Ractors employs many RUP-based process templates when building software systems (web applications of different scales, business support systems, network applications, etc.). For instance, our use of RUP’s iteration model allows us to smoothly incorporate changing customer requirements into a project’s final system architecture, so that we can tailor the end product to meet our customer’s real needs.

Project Management System

Ractors Project Management System is Lotus Notes-based business support system for storing, tracking, and analyzing data from our software projects. All development activities are logged, so that project managers, as well as the customers, can obtain information about team output on a regular basis. Such monitoring enables our projects to remain true to their predetermined budgets. This system also allows us to more effectively manage our resources. Statistical analysis of project history data is used to more precisely supervise project development, which in turn, allows for more accurate planning of future projects.

CMM: A fundamental tool for process improvement

The SEI Software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was adopted by Ractors as a framework for continuous software-development-process improvement. The use of CMM enables an organization to steadily improve its organization-wide software processes to reap continuous and lasting gains in software-process capability. CMM helps a firm to identify the characteristics of effective software processes, which the firm, in turn, can tailor and apply to its own software processes in accordance with maturity level recommendations.