Continuous Delivery/Deploy

We have helped several of our clients to implement Continuous Delivery & Deploy, complete with well-functioning delivery pipelines and immune systems. With proven business values as shorten time to market, mitigation of business risks and getting a more reliable and repeatable software delivery process

Our experiences cover both the technical aspects of establishing flow based Software Delivery processes, as well as mind set and training to drive the changes necessary for successful adoption.

We work with small to large software development organization with proven ability to manage complex, resource-intensive projects and teams for both limited and multimillion Euro projects. Our skills and experiences covers most commonly used tools within CI/CD, including usage of Docker containers and orchestration.

Contact our DevOps lead architect by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.

Scalable System Architecture

Effective delivery of software based products and services has by far became one of the strongest enablers of a high performing business. This requires a system architecture capable to scale up for innovation of more products and services, capacity for more developers and teams, more integrations, increased operational capacity, load and volume, etc.

We have helped several clients to adopt new technologies, transforming their IT landscape. Examples of what we can assist you with

• Implementation, education and hands-on training
• Implementing a microservices oriented architecture
• Introduction to modern IT-infrastructure and design for IT craftsmen and technical managers. We call it "Migrating to now"
• Introducing and implementing solutions related to infrastructure as code
• Cloud migration of safety critical and complex IT-environments
• Adoption of new technologies and assist you in avoiding the pitfalls

Contact our software experts by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.

Test Automation

Our systems are becoming more complex and the pace of change increases. Refactoring of IT-architecture is needed to stay competitive and thus, the need for periodic frequent time consuming tests grows. To meet this need we need to become more effective in our testing, for example, by automating reliable tests that can be maintained with reasonable efforts.

By using test automation in an effective and appropriate way, adopting principles of test driven development and acceptance test driven development you get benefits as

• Higher reliability and robustness when performing refactoring of architecture and design
• Increased precision in developing the right functionality, getting the correct system behavior and early feedback on implemented features
• Shortened execution time for regression test cycles
• Ability to increase the pace of changes, by having more frequent test cycles and increased test coverage without consuming extra time and money for additional testing
• Systems with increased maintainability, testability and shorter Time To Market

Examples of our experiences includes implementation of Behaviour Driven Development, Test Driven Development, parallel test execution of mobile applications for various platforms and devices. We are helping our clients with development and tailoring of test frameworks, and architecture for automated testing, by using a mix of open source, freeware and commercial tools.

Contact our test automation architects, send a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se.

Test Data Management

Test Data Management is not just about compliance and protecting your business data, it is also an enabler for increased capacity to deliver software and IT-services.

Innovation Capacity Group has a long track record of implementing highly effective and automated solutions for masking, generating, selecting and provisioning data for test and development purposes. Our experiences come from helping various clients within banking and finance, insurance, e-commerce companies and government agencies, achieving the following:

• Legal compliance concerning test data and fulfilling business policy's
• Integration of Test Data Management in your software delivery life cycle / delivery pipeline for increased IT delivery performance
• Implemented and tailored solutions for effictive selection and creation of test data
• System support for handling subsets and extracts of test data to reduce test volumes or cloning specific test data objects
• Effective support for test data provisioning, e.g. by using advanced technology for data virtualization, compression and sharing of data blocks. Thus, secure copies of datasets can be delivered in minutes even for large volumes spread across multiple data sources
• Support for configuration control, sync, cloning and distributing datasets to different environments

Contact our lead TDM architect by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.

Service Virtualization

SV is a method and technique to emulate the behaviour of external systems or components in heterogenous application environments.

Besides that, Virtual Services are commonly used to simulate external dependencies when performing end-to-end testing. One typical use case is when you have a system under test with masked data and you need to simulate external dependencies, without having to mask the external system. Another aspect is the ability generate responses, events and behaviour that are difficult to create in a real environment. Fake systems often are better than the real thing within a design and development lifecycle.

SV shall not be confused with server virtualization or traditional mocking/stubbing. Mocks tend to be more limited, giving a specific behavioural response to meet a certain need. While a Virtual Service can be deployed throughout the entire software delivery life cycle, consistently responding for all development and testing purposes. Another aspect is that a Virtual Service is deployed as a real component, enabling the behaviour of entire network backend services.

Typically, SV is used for system integration, system and performance tests to address the following needs

• Dependencies of components that are not yet completed or that still are evolving
• To simulate components that are expensive or complicated to set up in several instances
• Simultaneous access by different teams with varied test data needs
• End-to-end testing with masked data that involves dependencies towards external parties
• Access external components that are restricted or costly to use for performance testing

Contact our subject matter experts within SV by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.

Operational Intelligence

Our Infrastrucure Architects and Ops experts helps our clients to implement solutions for real-time dynamic monitoring, to deliver visibility and insight of operational conditions. This resulting in operational instructions with the ability to take corrective and preventive actions. Actions that also often can be automated when appropriate

Our background is a very broad practical experience base with a technical specialization in IT environment architecture (traditional, cloud and container based), Application Performance Management and operational data analytics.

A state of the art solution within Operational Intelligence is characterized by

• It has high reliability concerning operational security and availability
• It is autonomous
• It is always present
• It is self-learning and evolving

Contact our infra lead architect by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.

Cloud Computing

We have a track record of helping several clients to scale up provisioning and set up of IT environments for development, test and production systems by migrating their existing IT infrastructure from on premise to cloud services. By implementing principles for Infrastructure as Code we have helped our customers to get a repeatable and reliable set up of environments, and more cost-effective IT-operations. We have done this for critical systems with high complexity and rigorous security constraints in well-established enterprises, as well as for smaller IT-environments. We have experience from the following cloud based IT infrastructure service providers: AWS/EC2, Skytap, ElastX and Azure

Contact our lead cloud architect by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.

Methods and SDLC/ALM

We have helped several clients to tailor and implement practices and tools to optimize their Software Development Life Cycle and Application Life Cycle Management.

Innovation Capacity Group offers expertise throughout the entire value stream for an application life cycle. Below is a typical Value Stream Map.



It highlights why the introduction of a more effective software development have such limited effect on the overall capacity of a software organisation. In this example, reducing development and testing to zero by some magical means, would still yield no more than 15% improvement of Time To Market, with the corresponding 15% impact on the Cost of Delay. Creating more effective organisations at enterprise level are needed. Also note that in this very typical process, the queue times amounts to more than 85% of the total process time.

You need feedback to learn

Does this mean that we advocate against practices to achieve more effective software development? Most emphatically NOT! We believe it is of importance to have a high performing IT delivery, as it is one of the strongest enabler of a high performing business in general. One of the reasons for this is that it is a strong enabler of learning; as it turns out, all learning is improved by good feedback, and the faster and more accurate feedback we get, the better we learn. And of course, learning is the basis for all improvements.

Innovation Capacity Group has experience of assisting our clients in implementing SDLC/ALM tools and methods. In order to support a highly efficient software delivery throughout the entire process from inception and requirements capturing to verification and post evaluation, and to the point to where an application is no longer in use.

Contact our experts by sending a message to info@innovationcapacitygroup.se for more information.