Originally the interview was published on SuperbCrew.com
Intetics Inc. is a global technology company with over two decades of history. They create and operate professional distributed teams for its clients to deliver first-rate services for custom software development, software testing, system integration, and data processing.
Q: Could you tell us something more about the company?
A: Intetics prides itself on being a pioneer of Offshore Dedicated Teams, the inventors of Remote In-Sourcing, Predictive Software Engineering framework and Technical Debt Reduction Platform (TETRA). The comprehensive industry experience along with the unique method of software delivery allows us to guarantee the clients receive the results they actually expect.
Q: You’ve recently announced launch of the independent software product assessment service, TETRA; could you tell us something more?
A: TETRA stands for Technical DebT Reduction plAtform. It was created to give a quantitative assessment of software product quality and to reveal even minor software bottlenecks. However, you may have a question “why technical debt then?”. The idea is quite simple. For us, technical debt is not merely “code added now that will take more work to fix at a later time”. We see technical debt as a “combined product non-compliance with technical guidelines and business objectives that negatively impact business results”, which is a certain level of software quality. TETRA was created to clearly define and measure technical debt with the aim to eliminate or at least minimize it. As you see, we are going beyond the running tests. Intetics goes further, we look at both technical and business sides.
TETRA assesses software product per 8 dimensions. To define them, we spent 6000 hours of original research to pick out those that are critical for business. Those 8 dimensions include:
- Source code quality – assessment of the quality of the product source code by a number of critical parameters.
- Usability, UI & Documentation – evaluation of the product user interface, usability, and documentation.
- Security – valuation of product vulnerabilities according to CVE, CERT, CWE, OSVDB, OWASP, and BID.
- Performance – measurement of product performance and load parameters.
- Business logic – audit of how the product fits into the business objectives.
- Architecture quality – expert assessment of product software core structure and data model.
- Data quality – verification of product resistance to bad data, exception handling, and bad data prevention.
- Open Source code use – detection of the use of open source and other 3rd party code.
For each dimension, we determined what critical metrics shall be measured and what levels they shall achieve. It allows receiving a comprehensive product assessment with very concrete, to the point recommendations and understand how the product actually “feels”.
In the process of assessment, the product goes through a set of checks, tests, and evaluations that result in reports describing the state of the product on each level. For example, the assessment of the source code includes the analysis of the cyclomatic complexity, duplications, code coverage, rules compliance, and SQALE. These 5 metrics, from perhaps 150 metrics that you can get for your source code, are critical for source code quality. Using them, we show what and where shall be fixed to sharply decrease the probability of bugs in your code.
With a similar approach to analysis and measuring other dimensions, we create the final comprehensive report. It gives the description of every product weakness and explains where it may lead to if not fixed. To make the assessment 100 percent unbiased, we use about 20 tools for process automation and check product compliance with 17 standards, certificates and sets of industry guidelines. All of that allows seeing the big picture.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your services?
A: Intetics core competency is the creation of IT teams to develop software in conditions of incomplete specification and talent shortage. This means we do not expect that our clients have a complete set of software specifications, the full description of the software product requirements or clear business goals. The teams, we create for our clients, develop software basing on the BA and evaluations done together with the client in the initial stages of the project.
Our five core offerings allow to cover all of these, among those:
Turn-key software development. This is literally the all-inclusive product development. Our teams do everything from requirements gathering to product support.
Remote In-Sourcing. This is about creation and operation of IT teams for our clients. We create a 100% dedicated project team. It includes the number of team members, their seniority, and specialization the client needs. These teams are deeply integrated into the client IT team. The client chooses the team members itself, interviews them, assigns tasks, defines work schedules and project worklog. Though the team is located on our premises, client manages it itself. This makes the Intetics team a true extension of client IT staff. In case the client does not have an IT team or department, we create it. This is like client’s company division located in our office. Following this scheme, we created the teams that for our client for about 12 years. These are clients’ remote development teams. A great option for those companies who do not have or don’t want to have proprietary IT teams.
GIS & Geo solutions development. One of our unique services. We have over 200 employees who specialize in GIS data processing and GIS application and solution development. With the profound knowledge and expertise, we create solutions for Geospatial Services maps and navigation companies, location-based services, geodesy and cartography, ecology and nature supply services.
Technical debt reduction and in-depth software product assessment (TETRA).
On-site consulting. Quite often Intetics experts work on the client’s premises to run various types of analysis from business requirements and software analysis to in-house development process evaluation. We give recommendations, suggest improvements, integrate new practices and set-up processes. Oftentimes this is crucially important for efficient software product development.
Q: How the Intetics approach to software development and delivery is different to others?
A: This is all about our proprietary framework – Predictive Software Engineering (PSE). It advocates the development of custom software products in a way that is transparent by involving all stakeholders. The framework is specifically tailored for using the global pool of talented professionals. As result, clients receive a high-quality software product within a guaranteed timeframe and intended budget. Today companies use it to ensure that the software development process is precise and predictable.
The framework consists of seven specific concepts:
• Meaningful Customer Care
• Proven Productivity
• Efficient Distributed Teams
• Disciplined Agile Delivery
• TETRA
• Transparent End-to-End Control
• Sound Human Development
Together they ensure transparency, as well as render the process controllable and predictable in its essence.
The Predictive Software Engineering framework assists companies with forming a development team most suitable for their project, i.e. equipped with the required set of skills, experience, and knowledge, as well as achieving the best overall efficiency, both financial and productivity-wise. Additionally, it guarantees getting a product that fully meets business objectives with the least technical debt possible. Out partners who leverage this framework are to eliminate uncertainty in software development projects and transform product development into the process that guarantees results, making software development predictable, and business results easier to attain.
Q: What are your plans for next six months?
A: Intetics has the innovation in its DNA. We are actively engaged in research and development of machine learning technologies, computer vision and robotic process automation (RPA). Recently, we created a separate department focused on the implementation of these technologies. Several of our clients already our RPA solutions for effective business process management. We intend to develop our skills in this direction.