Open Initiative Consulting is a Richmond Metro Area consulting company that provides comprehensive software development solutions at each phase of the lifecycle. We've got you covered throughout the process: from requirements, design, development, testing, and deployment.
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University of California, Center for HIV Information

The Center for HIV Information at UCSF manages several high volume websites with medical information for doctors and patients. They regularly implement a multitude of new features for a variety of clients, so the pace stays fast. As a side effect, the amount of code and software packages was becoming unmanageable.

Our first effort was to reduce the amount of repetitive tools, until there was one database and search system. The next step was to create shared libraries and a test framework from large amounts of “cut-and-paste” code. The effort allowed for rapid bug fixes that could be immediately tested and deployed by the production staff.

We also held trainings on a variety of front-end technologies, from XSLT to SQL to jQuery. This helped mediate the bottleneck of the limited engineering staff.

On the systems end, the Sun equipment was not configured to handle failures. We setup redundant disk configurations with ZFS, added Network Attached Storage to increase expansion, and created synchronized fail-over servers for catastrophic situations. We eventually moved the whole operation to Amazon’s EC2.

All of these efforts were included with ongoing software development, releasing four new sites.

Capital One
Capital One had a complex deployment requirement for releasing it largest customer facing application to multiple WebLogic servers running on Solaris. We worked to reduce the amount of human interaction by developing shell scripts and application server tools to move and configure components on the fly. We also handled the native connectors that talked to legacy financial applications. To manage large amounts of configuration stored in XML, we created a C parsing tool with a rudimentary XPath style syntax.

The system greatly reduced required length for the maintenance window and potential down time. After a few releases, in house staff were able to create build packages and deploy them independently.
Circuit City
Circuit City needed a store shelving pattern distribution system and they needed it fast. We were able to hammer out requirements specifications for the first iteration within the first day and had a working demo only two weeks after the start of the project. We installed a bug tracking system and wiki to keep the project stakeholders up to speed.

The second phase of the project was devoted to teaching the staff Java so they could manage future development. We taught a beginners Java class and a more advanced enterprise option to help build familiarity with the web components. After our training, the staff was able to handle the next release.

Circuit City kept us on for another two months to create an automated build process for other applications that drove their main web site.
John Wiley and Sons
John Wiley and Sons is a multinational publishing company that needed to manage information about their journal products. Our responsibility was mostly process management, with scope creep threatening to extend the effort far beyond a reasonable time frame. We introduced iterative development to bring small releases quickly to production.

We worked with two in-house developers: utilizing scrums, UML modeling, and code reviews to construct the system. We were also responsible for building and maintaining the development and QA environments, including several Linux blades and a DB2 database.

The project was successfully deployed to a AS400 Linux partition after a tuning effort when slow database queries were replaced with materialized views and a Lucene search index.