Services
Our Point of View
Technologies have a life cycle and there has been a great deal written on this subject. For the pioneers who develop new technologies there are few roadmaps. For example, the inventors of the transistor were not trying to incrementally improve the vacuum tube. Innovation is about disruptive technologies.
Our focus at KnowledgeBytes is in mastering promising innovations in information technology so that we can help our clients understand when these technologies are appropriate and how to apply them effectively. There is an overwhelming supply of published material describing every possible technique and practice in information technology.
We have learned by experience that a critical success factor for most practitioners is having a guide who has mastered the details but also understands the big picture. Our consultancy offers a team of experts who have this experience and customer focus.
Here are some of the challenging problems and the approaches that we have mastered to help clients achieve their objectives. We have developed deep insights about these complex problems that allow us to offer sophisticated, nuanced evaluations of specific situations and the alternative technologies. Our approach is collaborative — to work closely with our clients to:
- Clearly frame the problem
- Understand the causes and separate out the affects or symptoms
- Consider appropriate approaches
- Lead pilot projects to evaluate the techniques on the client's problem
- Train the client's practitioners
- Support the client's organization as it scales up the application of the technology and evaluate its effectiveness
Browse our catalog of services and please contact us to discuss your challenges in harnessing the power of information technolgy to address your high-value business problems. If we think we can help, we'll gladly discuss our approach; if we are not confident that we can help, we'll offer to help you find the right resources that can.
Expert Witness: Are you the defendant in a case where you have been charged with violating intellectual property (IP) rights for software? Are you concerned that the software IP rights have been violated? Have you been injured or harmed through the failure of a software-controlled device? Are you the defendent in a liability suit where harm or injury has been claimed due to the failure of a software-controlled system that you developed?
These are very serious situations with enormous financial consequences. We provide expert witness service to attorneys to analyze the technical aspects of a case involving software IP or injury and provide unbiased, rigorous analysis and interpretation.
Web site services for small businesses: Are you a small business owner who is not satisfied with your web site? Many small business owners feel trapped by their company's web site because they are difficult to maintain and the content has become stale. Often, small business are in a bind — either paying too much to maintain their sites or their sites no longer reflect the company's products or services. Many web sites have been built with graphics that look OK on a large computer screen but do not present well (or at all, in the case of Flash) on the mobile devices that are becoming ubiquitous.
We offer web site development and renovation services to small businesses to help them regain control of their sites and turn them into business assets. Yes, there are a zillion providers out there who know how to build web sites, but we offer a service that addresses the needs and objectives of your business. We talk with our clients in English, not techno-jargon; our client focus assures your satisfaction. We are also committed to technical excellence; as a sign of fine craftsmanship and quality in our work, the sites we develop or renovate conform to the World-Wide Web Consortium's validation services for HTML (why not give your web site a try?). If you are ready to reclaim your web site (or create a new one), please contact us.
High-value Problems, Innovative Solutions
Requirements Modeling | Managing Complexity | Agile Software Development | Expert Witness
Requirements Modeling: Complex systems succeed (or fail) based on how well the systems engineers have specified the requirements. This quickly gets into issues of correctness, completeness, avoidance of conflicting requirements, derived requirements, and verification & validation needed to make assurance argument.
Solving these technical challenges is crucial in many industries and domains. We have helped clients leverage these approaches in diverse fields such as aerospace, automotive, medical, defense — to support the development of mission-critical or safety-critical software systems.
Managing Complexity: Contempory information systems that offer rich user experiences in an easy-to-use, intuitive manner require a great deal of behind-the-scenes complexity. From a developer's perspective, this level of complexity is difficult to manage; for a large, complicated development project, the programmatic complexity is difficult for the project manager and other stakeholders to manage. Without the appropriate power tools, these understandability thresholds become barriers to larger, more complex systems and projects.
Developed from years of consulting experience on managing complexity in systems and projects, KnowledgeBytes has developed a set of power tools that can help developers and managers understand and manage complexity in their systems and projects.
We have successfully applied model-driven engineering (MDE) to create powerful abstractions of complex systems that allow developers to understand and manage these technical challenges. We have leveraged models and applied formal methods & theorem provers and automated test generation to identify requirement and design defects, while significantly reducing the testing cost and schedule and improving its effectiveness.
We have assisted project and program managers in using MDE measurement to provide objective information to more accurately manage projects. We also have applied hybrid Bayesian Nets to model various combinations of subjective information or expert opinions with quantitative data to improve the prediction and estimation of project cost, schedule and quality factors such as defects.
Agile Software Development: The publication of the Agile Manifesto on February 2001 could be called the birth of the Agile software development movement. Since then, it has been steadily gaining traction in industry with very impressive results in improved customer satisfaction, improved flexibility for changing requirements, reduced "time to value," and improved quality.
Agile is much more than iterative development or daily stand-up meetings. It is based on a conceptual model that is radically different from classical software development. To realize its promise requires that systems development stakeholders understand agile's conceptual model and learn new behaviors, not just new technical techniques. Time and again, we have seen teams of talented developers attempt to adopt agile without achieving the "advertised" results, which feeds the spurious conclusions that agile is just hype or it can't work in our environment.
We have trained dozens of teams of developers and learned first hand how to ensure successful experiences with agile and avoiding frustration and dead ends. We have also advised organizations that are being challenged to adopt agile on a large scale to find the enabling management design patterns and avoid the anti-patterns that can inhibit or block achieving the desired outcomes.
