T-Mobile: Consultancy, Development and Management
link: T-Mobile
LShift have been providing consultancy and development services to T-Mobile for several years now.
The Brief
T-Mobile had developed a SOA security gateway that protected their payment systems in Germany. It logically consisted of an IBM Datapower XS40 dedicated hardware XML firewall to enforce security policy, and an LDAP server to provide it.
The system was developed in-house by a small team. We were approached to support the team by:
- improving the software management of the platform, eg., introducing source control, issue tracking, deployment processes
- helping improve testing, documentation and configuration
- helping develop and evolve the gateway for use in other platforms
Do to changes in the internal team we had to take on full support of the gateway in a short amount of time.
Our fundamental responsibility was to create a secure system that allowed much easier partner integration.
The Solution
Handover was achieved via:
- interviews
- documentation review
- pair working during transition
- identification and archiving of likely documentation
- execution testing of software
Improved software management was achieved by:
- introducing source control. As there was no project server infrastructure available we initially used Monotone - as it is a distributed system we could easily share amongst peer developers. Once we had a server available we migrated to Subversion to take advantage of the tight integration with Trac (see below) and to move us closer to the existing department in terms of technology usage.
- improved issue tracking, used LShift's existing Bugzilla infrastructure
- testing and documentation of processes for system testing and deployment. Some of these are now automated to allow quicker iterations of development
We improved the tools set via:
- better configation generation tools
- greater abstraction
- greater automation
- centralised configuration so it can be shared by config generation process and all the tools
We improved test suite via:
- greater automation
- widened test coverage
- integration with JUnit for better running and reporting
- identifying and fixing bugs
Other Improvements were achieved by:
- tightening up document control
- introducing knowledge sharing materials available via the company intranet
- creating a guide to help the Partner Integration Team diagnose common partner problems
- introducing monitoring of key systems
As well as the above, we have continued to support issues as they arise, from failed hardware to configuration upgrades
The Result
The system functions as specified and is now completely reliable. As a result of our work there has been no downtime outside of scheduled updates, and even this can be measured in seconds in the year and a half we have been supporting the system. We are currently planning a number of new deployments of the platform.
Technologies Used
Ant, Apache Axis, Bugzilla, Debian Linux, Eclipse, HSRP, HTTP/HTTPS, IBM WebSphere DataPower XML Security Gateway, JUnit, Java, LDAP, Maven, Monotone, Red Hat Linux, SOAP, Solaris, Subversion, Sun Directory Server, TCP/IP, Trac, XML, XSLT/XPath, soapUI