Eiffel Software: Your Consulting Partner

Eiffel Software Consulting

Object-oriented technology holds the promise of vast improvements in software quality and productivity. But the road to object-oriented success is full of dangers. Poorly understood concepts, inadequate training, ill choice of project, wrong personnel assignments, insufficient planning, unrealistic expectations, incorrect time estimates can all defeat the best of intentions.

Rooted in a practice of object technology going back to the mid-seventies, Eiffel Software Consulting takes advantage of the experience of writing thousands of classes, totaling hundreds of thousands of lines of successfully delivered software. Coming from the team that created Eiffel, Design by Contract and the BON analysis and design method. Eiffel Software Consulting has already benefited numerous Fortune 500 companies, as well as smaller corporations and agencies, in the US and Europe.

All Eiffel Software Consulting is backed by the personal commitment of Dr. Bertrand Meyer, Eiffel Software's Chief Scientific Advisor and one of the world's foremost software authorities.

Areas of expertise

Consulting is available in the following areas:

• Review of existing systems (for example as part of an assessment of a possible reengineeering).
• Architectural review (where our consultants analyze a proposed design developed by your team for a new system, and identify areas of strength and weakness, risk factors, possible improvements).
• Requirements analysis for new systems, including cost estimates for the development, risk analysis, resource planning.
• System architecture and design.
• Custom application development.
• Design and implementation of compilers, visual CASE tools and interactive development environments for new languages (e.g. specialized application languages, object-oriented extensions to existing languages).
• Migration and conversion of legacy applications.

Consulting and training

Consulting is intricately connected with training. Eiffel Software Consulting complements Eiffel Software's training program, the Institute of Object Technology (IOT), which offers a complete curriculum for software developers and managers. The IOT's courses can be offered on site, tailored to your own needs and application area, and combined with a consulting program.

Doers, not just advisors

At Eiffel Software we believe that a consultant should be more than a consultant. He or she should be a professional currently active in the field.

Eiffel Software Consultants are practicing developers and project managers with fresh experience of participating in large O-O developments at Eiffel Software and in other companies.

A team approach

Eiffel Software Consulting is based on our experience that consulting works best with a team of consultants, under the leadership of a senior expert, rather than with a single person.

On-site and off-site consulting assignements rotate between the consultants assigned to the project. The client benefits from this approach, which does not add any cost, in many different ways:

• You get access to the cumulated know-how and ideas of several people, rather than just one. For example one team member may be an expert at analysis, another at implementation, yet another at user interfaces.
• The consultants work as a group and frequently interact with each other so as to find the best possible solutions to the toughest questions that arise during the project. Client confidentiality is of course respected; only officially designated consultants, approved by you, get access to designated project information.
• You are protected from unforeseen circumstances such as a consultant becoming sick or unavailable: in such a case, another team member simply takes over, avoiding the delay and extra work that would be incurred if you had to bring a new person up to date in the middle of the project.
• For long-term consulting projects, you avoid consultant obsolescence: between on-site assignments, consultants continue to participate in other advanced projects and remain at the leading edge of software technology. (A full-time on-site consultant might after a while become too much a part of your team, and lose the outsider's perspective which is so important to avoid pitfalls and to provide fresh ideas.)
• Every project has a designated chief consultant who is at all times fully responsible for the work of all members of the team, and remains your primary interface for strategic and managerial discussions.

Empowering the client.

A consultant should not be a hostage taker. At Eiffel Software we want to give you the means to control your own projects, not to make you dependent on us forever. Our consultants are trained to transfer their knowledge and expertise to you. In particular:

• The team approach means that no single consultant becomes so important that your entire project depends on him or her.
• Our ``TRAIN THE TRAINERS'' program enables you to have some of your own staff become ISE-approved O-O trainers based on the courses of the Institute of Object Technology, so that you can start your own educational program, specifically tailored to your problem domain and company culture.

Focus on reuse

The major promise of O-O technology is to delivery reuse. At Eiffel Software we have an experience, unmatched by any company in the industry, of producing and maintaining libraries of high-quality reusable components, both in application-independent domains such as data structures and algorithms and in application areas such as graphics, GUI, GIS, banking and others.

Developing a good company- or application-specific library is a highly rewarding but also highly demanding task which requires years of experience in the practice of constructing reusable components. Eiffel Software Consulting can help you develop your own library by matching our expertise in library building with your expertise of the application domain. This is a unique way of capitalizing on the best O-O technology has to offer, while preparing the software future of your company.

References

Many companies in the USA and Europe have taken advantage of Eiffel Software Consulting. We will be glad to provide you with references.