RAD Approach Gives Real Estate IT Team Quick Reflexes

Software Magazine, Dec, 2000 by Elizabeth U. Harding

THE IT TEAM at Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services (PRERS), Valhalla, N.Y., prides itself on its ability to react to change as swiftly as a dot-com, despite being part of a giant corporate culture. PRERS is a subsidiary of Prudential Insurance Company of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, with more than $300 billion in assets managed and administered.

PRERS has an aggressive release schedule for the Prudential Relocation Center, a password-protected Internet portal with aggregated destination and relocation information.

"The RAD [rapid application development] lifecycle methodology allows us to come out four times a year with new releases of Relocation Center," says Ken Ramaley, PRERS e-business delivery manager, who is responsible for IT delivery of the system. Relocation Center is one of the first fully integrated relocation portals in the industry, serving a large client base that ranges from Fortune 500 companies to U.S. government agencies.

In addition, Ramaley says that an integrated approach to the software development cycle for RAD has enabled his organization to decrease defects significantly, make better use of everyone's development time, and meet a much more accelerated delivery cycle.

A Core Team Vision

To meet their release schedule, IT works closely with other departments within PRERS. For instance, the core team overseeing Relocation Center comprises representatives from IT, product management (which handles communications), and the director of business systems, who is responsible for facilitating JAD (joint application development) sessions and gathering all the business requirements.

"We start off with an idea of what the application should do," says Ramaley. "Then we mold it into a preliminary vision-and-scope document which gets reviewed by the IT team. We then launch into business analysis and, during JAD sessions with managers, account executives, and national account managers, we flesh out the details that lead to the development of use cases. Based on the use cases, we generate systems specifications that tightly define how features are to be implemented."

To track the use cases, Ramaley says, PRERS uses Caliber-RM, a collaborative, Web-based requirements management system from Technology Builders Inc. (TBI), Atlanta. Caliber-RM helps organizations define, document, manage, track, and communicate application and system requirements. The Caliber-RM tool stores requirement data in a central repository and tracks changes to that data.

"Caliber is a very flexible tool," says Ramaley. "Our business systems team creates Caliber templates and enters our use cases. We are also using Caliber for change requirements and future releases. A powerful thing about Caliber is the traceability between requirements, so you can see the relationships and dependencies. Seeing the dependencies lets us make good prioritization decisions."

PRERS maintains a separate Caliber-RM template for systems requirements, Ramaley says. "We look at the use cases in Caliber as we establish systems requirements."

Caliber-RM via TBI's SQM Framework works with other tools in the software development cycle, such as TestDirector from Mercury Interactive, Sunnyvale, Calif. TestDirector is a scalable test management tool that organizes and directs the quality assurance process. Ramaley says that users derive benefits from the TBI/Mercury Interactive partnership.

"We stress test our applications," says Ramaley. "In addition to TestDirector, we use the whole suite of Mercury Interactive's tools to assist us with testing. Staying consistent with the TBI/Mercury partnership, we can use the same script for load testing and share scripts across different Mercury applications."

Integrating the software development process from requirements through development and testing ensures higher quality applications.

In addition, the RAD schedule, according to Ramaley, gives PRERS the ability "to act like a small, nimble organization within a powerful, large organization.