Our client provides advanced technology solutions and services for public-safety infrastructure and emergency management systems. The company serves the public and private sectors with automated communication solutions that insure interoperability among existing alert systems and critical engineering support for emergency management and planning. Clients including the Department of Homeland Security, numerous state agencies and large corporations who rely on Safer Services for critical engineering support to optimize work flow processes and emergency preparedness infrastructure.

The company recently announced its next-generation product, a sophisticated, Windows-based system that links and centralizes separate emergency alert and notification systems and provides a common interface for controlling alerting devices and immediate emergency notification to emergency personnel and the public.

As the company’s internal team developed the system’s core applications, they faced a large volume of work creating custom communication components for the many systems they needed to support. These components, called Channel Adapters and Device Adapters, required advanced coding techniques to comply with various multiplex communications protocols of the legacy systems they needed to support. The Adapters had to operate in a seamless and highly reliable mode for their mission-critical operations.

The company initially retained Amadeus Consulting to assist with the design and development of their Channel and Device Adapters. Amadeus consultants successfully delivered the first series of Adapters, and our client quickly recognized the deep expertise and skills in advanced .NET software development that Amadeus brought to the project. As a result, Amadeus’s role was expanded to help meet their greatest challenge – integrating the system’s complex communications interfaces.

To help achieve their ambitious project goals, two Amadeus developers worked at the client’s offices for over two months. Working on site allowed Amadeus consultants to become part of the company’s internal development team and to facilitate effective communications and team work. Amadeus consultants participated in design meetings and actively contributed to decisions on the development strategy and ongoing refinements to their aggressive 6-month project plan.

Based on the demonstrated ability of Amadeus to deliver high-quality .NET development services and to help achieve their challenging project goals, Amadeus’s role was further expanded. Amadeus was engaged to refine the total system architecture, perform a complete code review and actively drive the full software development lifecycle.

In this on-going consulting and development role, Amadeus has provided invaluable assistance including:

• Structured development processes to insure consistent quality for high reliability and scalability
• Advanced application management techniques to insure tightly coordinated operations and communications among multiple, complex, multi-threaded applications running simultaneously
• “Defensive coding” techniques and best practices coding standards resulting in a highly robust, resilient and reliable code base
• “Class-based” unit testing and thorough use case testing for each object in the code
• Use of advanced .NET Remoting for inter-process communications among multiple distributed applications
• Development of a custom library of application-specific, re-usable .NET components which accelerated development time
• Use of advanced XML for maximum flexibility in specifying complex custom configurations
• Innovative implementation of a custom chat client using XMPP Chat Server to monitor distributed inter-process communications
• Transfer of deep development expertise to internal staff.