The Tradeco Group - an international group of companies with offices in the UK, the Middle East, and the Far East.

Situation

The client had an innovative idea for a new product aimed at the law-enforcement and telecommunications markets.  They needed a team that could analyse and specify their requirements, design and build the product, then provide an ongoing relationship to support, maintain and enhance it.

Action

Purple Crane staff initially built a working prototype to extract more detailed requirements, test the market, and demonstrate the product to potential investors.  The successful outcome led to the acquisition of funding and agreement for subsequent phases of the project.

The team created an architecture for the entire system, designed to address the issues of a wide ranging set of stakeholders.  Detailed design and development then progressed as an iterative process using continuous integration and Agile development techniques to ensure that a working version of the system was available at all times.  Each component of the prototype was integrated into the new architecture and then replaced in turn.  New components were then developed and incorporated into the working system.

Result

The resulting product - a distributed network of securely communicating data retrieval components - recently won a Frost & Sullivan award for product innovation and is currently under review by a number of national governments. 

Technology

Microsoft .NET, Delphi, C#, MS Sql Server, MSMQ, ASP.NET, Web Services, NHibernate, Starteam, CaliberRM, MS Project, MS Visio (UML diagramming).