MyDraft
Development in the Cloud
Faced with the very short period of time in terms of economic activity cycles, companies are constantly in a state with characteristics similar to those of innovation ie change, disruption, instability, unpredictability.
These constraints, added to the consubstantial entropy of information technology supposed to support increasingly dematerialized processes, make information system to carry a load on delay and quality of deliverables that greatly affects the operational performance of companies.
Business owners then multiply - because of the lack of infrastructure and adhoc tools - initiatives (for example based on spreadsheets) weakly collaborative, traceable, versioned and secured, resulting in widespread loss of control. Practices of an information system out of the IS department - becoming general with the Cloud - that will eventually return in the IS department in order to secure maintenance and upgrades.
- Build and run data-driven Web applications
MyDraft is a platform for developing business applications hosted in the cloud enabling operationals to view, capture, share and analyze business data driven by a traceability engine.
More specifically, this solution enables business owners, operational and non-IT people to :
• build by click and to quickly customize data-driven applications, through a continuous process of incremental prototyping with reusable rich components, without any technical skill
• seek developers, if necessary, to promptly complete the application with the required code, while keeping control over development and customization, without interrupting other users
• publish in the Cloud and to virally invite other users and contributors to enhance the value chain
• enable empowered stakeholders (named users, auditors, assessors, etc.) to navigate through the complete history of data, but also of successive prototypes, to rebuild instantly any previous system and to ensure the reproducibility of any report or processing, thus ensuring full compliance with the regulatory frameworks for traceability and governance.
Easy-to-Use and Time-to-Market
All statistics in this area come to that point : the productivity of development teams is notoriously inadequate to meet - in time - the need. Outsourcing only partly fixed the cost dimension. But also highlighted the perennial problem of misunderstanding between businesses and IT department. Problem mainly due to the technical and specific language of each stakeholder.
Because formalization has always been the most difficult exercise, there is growing recognition that it is useless to ask the business to understand the language and the difficulties of the IT. And vice versa to ask IT people to understand the issues and rules of the trade.
MyDraft follows the web 2.0 trend which fosters knowledge holders (business) to share it easily (as designers), with guidance (if needed) by developers. Based on an extensible library of visual components, MyDraft allows the business, through mouse clicks, giving birth to their ideas, by assembling ready-to-use rich components without the usual double formalization (from oral to written, from writing to computer code) and without prior technical knowledge (that is to say they are staying at business side and are not becoming developers).
Iteration and collaboration
Defining software specifications is an exercise impossible to achieve right in one pass. So much so that it is the primary cause of software development failure. The business owners indeed can not imagine all the scenarios. And project management has difficulty in understanding them and matching them with the underlying technical elements. This is why best practices of software engineering recommends to go through iterations and increments. Both in their writing and in their implementation. This also requires to put in place more or less formal procedures to ease collaboration between stakeholders.
Rather than offering an n-th integrated development environment supporting the productivity of the user alone, MyDraft combines a graphical environment (for rapid prototyping based on reusable visual components and a standard scripting language) to a built-in configuration and change management system (to keep control over successive iterations).
Thanks to a unique patented architecture, MyDraft facilitates interventions - through a Web browser - of any authorized player (IT skilled or not) and virally invited by the "author" in order to change the data-driven Web application in a continuous manner.
Traceability and business agility
International laws are very clear on the subject. So that electronic data can have any legal value, it takes another to prove their integrity throughout their journey, from creation to archive. Besides the influence of new regulatory requirements in terms of information storage, regulated or not industries (finance, banking & insurance, aviation & space, food, health, metrology, ...) are brought to harmonize their tools and practices to be in capacity to restore not only data but also their handling environment at any point in their lifecycle.
This ability soon becoming commonplace in integrated environments such as ERP (back office processes) or PLM (engineering processes) is generally poorly deployed in companies in regard to personal or departmental applications and their data because supported by disjoint technical solutions.
In natively integrating a proprietary (patented) data tracking engine, MyDraft allows authorized stakeholders (named users, auditors, etc) to browse the complete data history, but also the successive prototypes, to reconstitute instantly any previous system state and to ensure the reproducibility of any report or processing thus ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks for governance and traceability (ISO, COBIT, ITIL, CMMI, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc).
Therefore, writting a business case without changing the course of other users history, making comparisons between different scenarios starting from a given point in the past are new opportunities for businesses in their search for the optimal solution.
Rich Web and ergonomics
Like Wikipedia deals with resource-oriented text, the in-house BI applications handle complex data type, such as alternative scenarios, criteria, performance assessments, thresholds, organized either as atomic or aggregated data (ie collections, trees, matrices, graphs, etc.). Note here that - excluding time needed to formalize and clarify the need, monitor implementation, receive and test deliverables - the part of the user interface and data interaction layers is generally (assuming a standard productivity ratio and traditional tools) more than 50% of the overall cost of such an application.
For comparison, MyDraft allows businesses and non-IT people to make themselves the interactive part of the application, with support for rich user interfaces, including input from a keyboard, mouse or touch screen. Therefore, the economic leverage, free from the proposed technological breakthrough is determined by the massive reduction of the cost, delays and risks related to application development and maintenance.
Ergonomics, on which productivity is based, facilitates the data capture and update through a flexible, customizable, extensible user interface with third-party components, based on open standard technologies such as RIA, XML, Java EE or JPA.
Fast iteration and unit testing
The promise of iterative and incremental development can not be held without adopting a number of software engineering practices, particularly in the field of quality. Consequence of this refined approach, some changes or adjustments are then made by refactoring (or re-engineering), consisting of changing between two iterations the design or the architecture of a component without changing its behavior.
Technically trivial with the application code, it is more difficult when it comes to the database. In addition, the practice of agile development inherently involves a risk of regression, risk covered by unit testing and incremental delivery.
The MyDraft platform systematizes automated unit testing and makes the test coverage ratio - ie the proportion of code executed by unit tests - a key metric to estimate the level of development quality.
Collaboration and generated documentation
Software development is a team sport. Also the communication between players is essential to good collective performance. In development projects, it is done in particular through technical documentation which proves to be often overlooked because of its high resource consumption nature.
In the Mockup-Prototype-Application continuum, IT team members must be involved soon or late as automation could not guarantee 100% of the required capabilities. MyDraft makes available to project stakeholders an automated retro-documentation feature, for viewing and sharing in real time (thus always up-to-date) UML model of the application with classes, associations, multiplicities, etc.
Running in Cloud and TCO
Public, private or hybrid, Cloud Computing offers potentially significant gains in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO). These are proportional to the sharing level of the different layers of the technical architecture and made available on the Internet.
Built on top of the most advanced Web technologies, MyDraft is a hosted service on the Internet (PaaS) allowing to build business applications through mouse clicks, to publish in the cloud in order to ease the use in the new hyper-mobility operating environment and to virally invite users and other contributors to enrich the value.
It thus provides to businesses with an attractive solution, without having to acquire an IT infrastructure, with adjustable capacity to their needs (in terms of users at any given time, of volume of data handled, etc) while contributing to the constant search for economic and financial performance (since recorded as an OPEX expense for service operating leased instead of an expenditure of capital investments) as well as productivity.
