As a leading LANSA developer, Surround Technologies has designed a full set of development standards to incorporate all of the powerful facilities and interfaces of a Windows environment. Complete your LANSA projects more quickly, accurately and cost effectively by learning about the standards and practices that our clients have come to rely on. Let us show you how they can empower your development lifecycle.
Surround Technologies’ approach to standards
A standard, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, is “something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example.” While such structures sometimes operate as stumbling blocks to progress – as with the argument against change: “the old way worked well enough” – by and large they serve vital functions. Without engineering standards, bridges would fall down and buildings would collapse. Without application development standards, systems wouldn’t survive the test of time by providing cost effective, scalable, customizable and extensible solutions.
Surround Technologies maintains a set of Application Development Standards that account for most of our development and user interface guidelines and techniques. They have been developed to fulfill two major goals: to provide high quality applications to our clients and their users and to be effective at a low cost to businesses.
Responsibilities of the developer
Our development team uses our Application Development Standards as a guideline to developing software responsibly and effectively for us and our clients. While we encourage individual creativity, the goal of every developer is to produce software that adheres to the current interface standards and is consistent with that being produced by the rest of the team. The developer should always consider both the business end users of the software and the future developers that may need to enhance it.
Our developers understand that many business end users of varying skill sets may ultimately use each piece of software we develop. The look, feel and overall usability of the interface will impact the experience of those users.
Our developers also understand that all developers have to maintain and enhance each other’s code. Consistency, readability and reusability make that job easier for everyone while also reducing the cost and time involved in future maintenance and enhancement.
By incorporating our own Standards into our code, we are making our jobs easier. Ultimately, we are making the jobs of all development teams easier.
Our Standards & Techniques Practice incorporates:
- General application development
- Repository object naming
- Coding element/interface definitions, structures, and layout
- Data integrity
- Navigation
- Integration
- Heads down high speed data entry
- Code Generation
- Database Design and Development
- Entity-Relationship Modeling and Database Normalization
- Dimensional Modeling
- System integration and extension
- System Modernization
- Windows User Interface
- Line of Business Systems
- Kiosk Systems
- Utility, limited function applications
- Web User Interface
- Line of Business Systems
- Business to Business Systems
- Business to Consumer Systems
- Web Presence
- PDA and Pocket PC User Interfaces
- Application to Application Interfaces
- 5250 User Interfaces
- Security
- Usability
- Workflow
- Deployment
- Change Management
- Documentation
Many of these standards and techniques are inherent in our Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator (EVLA) product. EVLA provides a set of standard templates, Wizards, code generators and full functioning standardized modules to ensure a consistent user experience that is scalable and extensible.
Changes to the standard
As with all standards, there will be times when it is necessary to deviate in order to get better performance from the application.
We are constantly growing and changing and encourage all developers on the team to suggest new techniques and methods to help us improve our standards. If a developer has a good idea and shares it then the whole team can make use of it. At Surround we are always trying to improve the future.
As with most conventions, ours have been developed and improved over time. Any changes we make to our standards are planned and implemented in a controlled and strategic manner so that applications do not become fragmented. We make every effort to develop new standards so they are backward-compatible with previous standard developments. New standards are introduced in planned version releases for traceability purposes.
Our Client’s Standards
Although the Surround Technologies Application Development Standards have proven extremely effective for our own development efforts, as well as for many of our clients, we also recognize that they may not be right for every company. Our development team will work to learn, understand, and adhere to your own development standards. Our developers will only offer our standards as an alternative when it is appropriate.
Contact us for more information.