VSK Systems

The Process of Business Process Engineering

We believe that good software implementations begin with a comprehensive requirements analysis using a solid investigative process. Whether you’re looking to evaluate your current systems environment, current business processes, or need help defining requirements that are specific to your business, Arbela can help.

We provide a quick, practical assessment of your business and IT environment and have considerable experience in transferring our years of knowledge and expertise to our clients.

We work both on a project and organizational level, helping you pinpoint processes and requirements that will bring the most value and consistency across your business.

Process Design

The design process is often circular, looping back on itself as the team learns more about a project, ultimately informing the beginning of the process for the next project. The design process is rarely linear due to the ongoing analysis and synthesis and testing of ideas throughout the process and we have observed that phases will often overlap. At VSK Systems, we see the process in approximately 6 phases, as is suggested by the diagram above.

The Six Phases

Discover
(Analyze and Hypothesize)

Learning and discovering unknown things about the anticipated project.

Plan
(Test)

Trying out certain ideas or proposals that may lead you to better understand a project or lead you to more analysis and discovery about the project.

Create & Iterate
(Understand)

Creation and iteration of the concepts proposed demonstrate your understanding of the project – and point out the areas where we don’t understand it as well.

Implement
(Deliver)

Bringing together and documenting all of the ideas that are the results of the iterative process and delivering a finished product to the client.

Measure
(Assess)

Combining analysis of the delivered project with testing of the results in a better understanding of the success of a project.

Evolve
(Attain a Higher State)

Learning from the assessment of the results of a project and improving all of the steps of the design process.

To help our clients turn innovative ideas into a business reality, we help define with greater clarity specific initiatives and activities that drive strategy. Process design is twofold in nature; first, there is a focus on determining business requirements, describing them with a deeper level of granularity. Second, it is important to design the overarching program as well. We help characterize the resources and timelines required to accomplish the proposed solution. We evaluate technology architecture and select the appropriate technology platforms needed to build the proposed solution. In some cases, this may involve a software package and platform selection to determine the best fit for the overall solution. Not only will we assess software requirements, we will also review the operating platform and hardware preferences to establish the underlying components and their ability to cohabitate within the current environment.

Application Design

VSK Systems can design, build, evaluate, and refine your application in stages where possible. In each stage, we maintain a primary focus.

During each stage, we design with your users in mind. We incorporate user research methods at each stage. User research helps us solve issues with the application throughout the design process and the results help us to identify whether the application meets your user expectations.

By designing and evaluating the application in stages, we can focus on and evaluate the foundational elements early, reducing the chance of discovering those issues in later stages. For example, if we evaluate the concepts in stage two, we can identify whether we need to iterate the design before moving ahead. If we were to build a house, we would not want to be painting the walls (stage four task) when we realize that the door and some of the windows are in the wrong location (stage two task).

We add richness to the application as we progress through the design stages. For example, if we are scheduling tasks and we plan to add icons to some of the screens, we only need to provide placeholders for the icons in the first, second, and possibly the third stages of design. We do not need to design the icons until stage four. It is during stage four that we will focus on incorporating the visual design into the application.

Quality Assurance

Before releasing any application or business processes to the general population, we conduct rigorous testing, starting with unit testing conducted by our development and QA teams, and it continues with formal string testing of system features linked to other components and integrated systems.

VSK Systems conducts quality assurance (QA) testing either with your internal QA department or as an independent service offering, using testing automation tools and test-driven development (TDD) approaches.

VSK Systems conducts quality assurance (QA) testing either with your internal QA department or as an independent service offering, using testing automation tools and test-driven development (TDD) approaches.

Testing Automation

VSK Systems uses industry-leading methods throughout the development lifecycle to extend testing activities and to embed testing resources earlier in the build process. We leverage several techniques based on our client’s technology footprint, test requirements, organizational maturity and availability of tools that includes the appropriate blend of manual and automated test methods and procedures.

Test-Driven Development (TDD)

With both traditional testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD) you aren’t striving for perfection, instead you are testing to match the criticality of a system. A side effect of TDD is that you can achieve 100% coverage for every single line of code, something that traditional testing doesn’t achieve.