LANSA Standards & Techniques

As a leading LANSA developer, Surround Technologies has designed a full development methodology and set of standards to incorporate all of the powerful facilities and interfaces of a Windows environment.

Our Standards & Techniques Practice incorporates:

General application development
- Repository object naming
- Coding element/interface definitions, structures, and layout
- Data integrity
- Navigation
- Integration
- Heads down high speed data entry
- Code Generation
Database Design and Development
- Entity-Relationship Modeling and Database Normalization
- Dimensional Modeling
- System integration and extension
System Modernization
Windows User Interface
- Line of Business Systems
- Kiosk Systems
- Utility, limited function applications
Web User Interface
- Line of Business Systems
- Business to Business Systems
- Business to Consumer Systems
- Web Presence
PDA and Pocket PC User Interfaces
Application to Application Interfaces
5250 User Interfaces
Security
Usability
Workflow
Deployment
Change Management
Documentation

Our standards and techniques are proven practices that have been used successfully for many years in our own systems as well as many of our clients’ systems. Let us show you how they can empower your development lifecycle.

Many of these standards and techniques are inherent in our Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator (EVLA) product. EVLA provides a set of standard templates, Wizards, code generators and full functioning standardized modules to ensure a consistent user experience that is scalable and extensible.

Our goal is to provide you with the appropriate training for you to incorporate these LANSA standards and techniques into your development environment. The results will allow you to successfully complete your LANSA projects more accurately, more timely and with improved cost savings.

Surround Technologies approach to standards

A standard, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, is

“something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example.”

While such structures sometimes serve as stumbling blocks to progress – as when the argument against change is “the old way worked well enough” – by and large they serve vital functions. Without engineering standards, bridges would fall down. Without construction standards, buildings would collapse. And, so it would follow, without application development standards, systems wouldn’t survive the test of time of providing cost effective, scalable, customizable and extensible solutions.

Surround Technologies maintains a set of Application Development Standards. These Application Development Standards account for most of our development and user interface guidelines and techniques. They have been developed to fulfill two major goals: one, to provide high quality applications to our clients and end users; and two, to do so for as low a cost and in as short a period as effectively possible.

Responsibilities of the developer.

Our development team uses our Application Development Standards as a guideline to developing software responsibly and effectively for us and our clients. While we encourage individual creativity, the goal of every developer is to produce software that adheres to the current interface standards and is consistent with that being produced by the rest of the team. The developer should always consider both the business end users of the software and the future developers that may need to enhance it.

Our developers understand that many business end users of varying skill sets may ultimately use each piece of software we develop. The look, feel and overall usability of the interface will impact the experience of those users.

Our developers also understand that all developers have to maintain and enhance each other’s code. Consistency, readability and reusability make that job easier for everyone while also reducing the cost and time involved in future maintenance and enhancement.

By incorporating our own Standards into our code, we are making our jobs easier. Ultimately, we are making the jobs of all development teams easier.

Deviation from the standard.

As with all standards, there will be times when it is necessary to deviate from the standard to get better performance from the application or to handle a unique problem. However, all significant deviations are discussed in advanced with the project team. If the team determines the deviation is a necessity to the success of the project, then those deviations are carefully documented in the code, as well as in the design documentation, where they will be easily recognized and understood by future developers.

Changes to the standard.

We encourage all developers on the team to suggest new techniques and methods to help us improve these standards. If a developer has a good idea and shares it then the whole team can make use of it. And while it is not cost or time effective to go back and enhance standards used in past development, we can always improve the future.

As with most conventions, ours have been developed and improved over time. However, any changes we make to our standards are planned and implemented in a controlled and strategic manner so that applications do not become fragmented. In addition, we make every effort to develop new standards so they are backward-compatible with previous standard developments. Finally, new standards are introduced in planned version releases for traceability purposes.

Our Client’s Standards.

Although the Surround Technologies Application Development Standards have proven extremely effective for our own development efforts, as well as for many of our clients, we also recognize that they may not be right for every company. Our development team will work to learn, understand, and adhere to your own development standards. Our developers will only offer our standards as an alternative when it is appropriate.