Client Overview
Noblis is a nonprofit science, technology, and strategy organization located in Reston, Virginia that brings the best of scientific thought, management, and engineering expertise to their client, the U.S. Federal Government. The organization has about 1,200 employees overall, and a team of eight who create and manage an IBM Notes and Domino application exclusively for the federal government’s use. This application, called AcquTrak, helps their client solve problems and save money during their acquisitions of multibillion-dollar assets.
Business Challenge
It is quite easy to begin developing applications on Notes, and power users at Noblis wrote various internal applications many years ago. Although Noblis’ users found these applications useable for many years, they began to get bogged down over time as the applications aged due to some of the development techniques used in the original designs.
The team knew for several years that there were issues with these faulty legacy applications. Noblis’ current IBM Notes and Domino development team was tasked with remedying these issues. The migration of Domino to AWS afforded them the opportunity to investigate further.
The Teamstudio Solution
Kary Forth is the Senior Developer and Administrator who leads the development team at Noblis. He has used Design Manager and other Teamstudio tools at every company he has worked for since their debut. When he joined Noblis in 2009, he was easily able to demonstrate the tools’ value to budget managers and acquire them.
Kary uses Design Manager at Noblis to check and manage his team’s development work. He uses the tool to identify broken dependencies, make sure design elements coming from external databases are all coming from the right ones, and, in this case, troubleshoot and fix their old applications.
““Using Design Manager on some of the older applications, I was able to go and tell very, very quickly exactly what design elements were missing. It was really easy for us to go and pin down all of these issues that had been popping up that no one could really identify the cause of.””
Results
Since they migrated this server to AWS in Nov. 2016, Noblis continues to use Design Manager to find errors and fix code in their AcquTrak application twice a week, on average. If another issue with a legacy application needs to be fixed in the future, they could again benefit from using Design Manager, along with our other tools.
““Design Manager is essential for me and my team. There’s no other way to easily accomplish what I am using it for.””
In addition to Design Manager, the team at Noblis uses Teamstudio Analyzer, Configurator, and Profiler.