Code reuse pays off for ING

Computerworld - ING Americas last month finished work on a quality-management application built using an innovative development process that the company estimated saved it $300,000 and 1,200 man-hours.

The ING IT team first built the architecture and specifications for the application—about 60% of the work—and farmed out the rest to Glastonbury, Conn.-based TopCoder Inc., which solicits bids from independent developers interested in building components for specific projects. TopCoder also reuses Java and .Net components built for other projects.

"We've built applications from reusable code several hundred times internally, even through India-based outsourcing, but nothing quite like this, where you create a competition and put out an RFP on codable specs," said Chief Technology Officer Raymond Karrenbauer.

While the project's savings aren't hugely significant for Atlanta-based ING Americas, a division of $106 billion ING Groep NV, Karrenbauer said he hopes to institutionalize the service-oriented application development methodology, which he called "revolutionary."

Fast Fix Needed

The financial services firm needed the application in part for a massive data integration effort started in July 2001 that created a unified information architecture for its seven U.S. business units . Initial use of the system revealed data-quality problems that had to be fixed quickly. The company was able to build a complex application to fix the problem in two months using the new procedure.

For the ING project, 87% of the application came from reusable Java components, Karrenbauer said.

The application, completed late last month, was designed to improve the quality of information moving through several linked IBM DB2 Universal Database systems, which contain financial, customer, transaction, product and sales data.

The new program looks for data anomalies to see if any values are incorrect, such as name spellings or ZIP codes, and then alerts an administrator to correct them.

Karrenbauer said the new application, which consists of 17,000 lines of code in 13 modules, cost $20,000 to develop, compared with an estimated $400,000 to code it in-house.

"This is an interesting model, because it's like using a general contractor. The vendor takes your specification, puts out an RFP to build it, and then they perform a validation check on it. We then put it into production," Karrenbauer said.

"Right now, the big buzz is around code sourcing"—using outsourcers to build applications via traditional methods, Karrenbauer said. "Those are more cost-efficient models than we have today. But this is revolutionary. It blows those models out the window."

Requirements for a code reuse sourcing strategy A methodology or a process that fits the work and is just enough process. A list of steps that can be used to check for an architectural framework that can be reused. Formal quality assurance steps for inspecting the process. A repository for the code. The repository can be based on UDDI and vendor-built, like those from ASG-Rochade, LogicLibrary Inc. or Flashline Inc. A measurement program that demonstrates value of a reuse program within organizational objectives. Incentives to encourage programmers to follow the process and discourage them from doing things differently. Source: Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn.