To illustrate our capabilities we have included a brief list of projects that Huron Valley Software Consulting partners have made successful. These projects show the many different ways that Huron Valley Software Consulting can contribute to your organization.
Technical Crisis - in a large data networking system project, the asynchronous communications subsystem was losing one character out of every several million transported. The team responsible for the subsystem could not crack the problem. One of the partners was brought in to solve the problem. By examining the embedded code he discovered the timing window responsible for the lost characters.
Management Crisis - one of the partners was hired to lead the software development group at a small company, where software was not the major product line. The company had just released a rewrite of their product, which many customers were returning because it was unusable. The partner discovered that there were no procedures in place for testing, release, distribution, or any of the basic functions of a software group. The partner stabilized the software within three months, put processes in place to prevent a recurrence of the problems, and built the group into a successful department.
Customer Crisis - when one of the partners was hired as the software manager for control systems, the company’s biggest customer was irate because software bugs, needed features, and questions were not being addressed. By responding in a timely manner to the customer’s requests, she convinced him that the company valued his business and in turn, he purchased additional systems. The customer integrated the dynamometer control software with his own software. When the customer’s system failed, the partner not only found and fixed the bug in the customer’s software, but traced it to an incompatibility that occurred only when the target PC contained a certain, obsolete, UART (communications control chip).
Design Review - at a large software product company, one of the partners was asked to review the progress of a document distribution system project that was behind schedule. He discovered that after more than a year of work, the design was incomplete. The partner recommended that the group use an existing third-party product as the underlying technology, instead of trying to develop the entire system from scratch. The group adopted the recommendation and delivered the product in six months, instead of the estimated 12-18 months the existing design would have required.
Architecture - the partners, working together, took an existing 16-bit Windows-based document authoring system and redesigned it for a 32-bit, object-oriented environment. The new product supported a Microsoft Office-like user interface, complete with a multiple document interface and the ability to keep all windows consistent whenever the user edited data in any window.
Technical Innovation - in 1983, long before Microsoft Windows, one of the partners was leading a project to develop a menu-driven executive information system. At the time personal computers had very limited memory capacity, not nearly enough to accommodate all of the menu display and graphics capabilities desired for the product. To overcome this, she developed a library that would allow run-time linking long before DLLs existed.
Huron Valley Software Consulting LLC
702 Sunset Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
(734) 797-1675
klahey@hvsc.com