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White papers

• Eight Keys to Gaining ROI on IT Process Improvement

  There are three critical components to a successful process: Process Definition, Process Architecture, and Usage Model. These three key components are woven into eight key ideas (featured in this white paper) that can significantly improve your ROI from IT process improvement efforts. These ideas are the result of over 18 years of combined industry experience and are scalable from a lightweight process approach (without the use of tools) to a fully realized project. Your approach should be tailored based upon your project’s specific needs and scale. (39KB)

• Oracle and PeopleSoft: Seeing Through the Fog - Maximizing the return from your PeopleSoft investment in a post-merger world

  It has been a grueling 18 months for PeopleSoft’s customers, staff and partners. As the dust settles on the acquisition by Oracle and the roadmap for the combined organization becomes clearer, we’ll look at how there is an opportunity for customers to come out of this process stronger and better positioned for the future; but it will take effort, focus and inevitably investment. (302KB)

• RFID Roadmap: From Slap and Ship to Intelligent Integration

  It is inherently clear that RFID as deployed in the slap and ship approach, is nothing more than a new and eccentric auto-identification technology, falling short of the mark in terms of delivering real business benefit. The real benefit and ROI can be unlocked by integrating the real-time visibility that RFID affords with enterprise data locked in the enterprise IT environment, to support all of the dimensions of the real-time enterprise. (239KB)

• CIO Council Guidance on Service Component Based Architectures

  The purpose of this paper is to inform agencies thinking on development and use of enterprise architecture in a manner consistent with component sharing and reuse and the objectives of the FEA. (3714KB)

• Noblestar RFID Solutions Practice—RFID and Enterprise IT Integration

  This paper identifies several issues related to the integration of RFID and enterprise application systems, and suggests an analytical framework based on different levels of integration that are likely to persist in the future. (384KB)

• Preparing for Enterprise RFID

  This paper will give a brief overview of RFID technologies and how they work, what they can do for a business and how the business can best be structured to take advantage of them. (286KB)

• Improving Store Based Inventory Management with Mobile Solutions

  This white paper will briefly discuss the supply chain before moving on to various methods of inventory tracking on the shop floor and back-of-house, and the associated benefits that your business can gain from improving the efficiency of the stock taking process. The paper will focus on how, by using and extending your IT systems, you can benefit from timely, accurate and efficient inventory counting. (243KB)

• CRM Planning Checklist

  If you are about to embark on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiative, this roadmap contains general directions, helpful tips, and useful guidelines to benefit your organization both from a software selection and implementation perspective. (241KB)

• Software Engineering—Concepts and Design Principles

  The purpose of this document is to provide a statement of the Noblestar design practices and principles, and high level overview of Noblestar's application software architecture. (723KB)

• Maximizing Competitive Advantage at the Convergence of Business Strategy and Digital Technology

  Business strategy is about making a set of complex, interrelated choices that enable a company to compete effectively both today and in the future. A company's external and internal environments influence these strategic choices significantly. (41KB)

• Part 1: Introduction—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  The User Experience, Not Metrics Series of articles will address topics related to determining true user experience and application performance tuning using Rational Suite TestStudio coupled with Noblestar™s proven methodology of end-to-end Performance Engineering. (117KB)

• Part 2: Modeling Individual User Delays—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  Visitors to your Web site think, read, and type at different speeds, and it's your job to figure out how to model and script those varying speeds as part of your testing process. (464KB)

• Part 3: Modeling Individual User Patterns—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This part of the "User Experience, Not Metrics" article series discusses how to use Rational TestStudio to script and design suites to accommodate the many possible navigation paths users can choose to take, so that the results of a testing effort accurately represent user experience. (211KB)

• Part 4: Modeling Groups of Users—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This is the fourth article in the series, which focuses on correlating customer satisfaction with performance as experienced by actual users. (878KB)

• Part 5: Using Timers—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This is the fifth article in the series, which focuses on correlating customer satisfaction with performance as experienced by actual users. (238KB)

• Part 6: What is an Outlier and How Do I Account For One?—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This article shows you how to use Rational TestStudio to identify outliers and how to eliminate them from your test results and recreate performance report output in Microsoft Excel. (913KB)

• Part 7: Consolidating Test Results—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This is the seventh article in the series, which focuses on correlating customer satisfaction with performance as experienced by actual users. (65KB)

• Part 8: Choosing Tests and Reporting Results to Meet Stakeholder Needs—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This article outlines the types of performance-related tests that are commonly used to add value to a performance-testing effort, and ways to present the results of these tests. (181KB)

• Part 9: Summarizing Results Across Multiple Tests —The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  Performance testing is the discipline concerned with determining and reporting the current performance of a software application under various parameters. The series "User Experience, Not Metrics" discusses and demonstrates how to do it, with the help of the Rational Suite ® TestStudio ® system testing tool. Computers excel at this stuff, crunching numbers and displaying answers in neat ways. But there comes a time after the tests are run when someone who's reviewing the results asks the deceptively simple question, "So what, exactly, does all this mean?!?" This point beyond performance testing is where the capabilities of the human brain come in handy. (85KB)

• Part 10: Creating a Degradation Curve —The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This article will conclude a look at the topic of performance-related results reporting by discussing the single most powerful performance graph at our disposal, the degradation curve. (204KB)

• Part 11:Handling Authentication and Session Tracking —The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This article begins the final trilogy, which will discuss some advanced topics related to using Rational TestStudio to conduct performance testing. (134KB)

• Part 12:Conditional Navigation (Based on Return Values)—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  This article discusses when you might want to script conditional navigation and shows you how to do it. (122KB)

• Part 13:Working with Unrecognized Protocols—The "User Experience, Not Metrics"

  Now your boss comes to you and says, "Great job on those performance tests! I've got another one for you—a custom application that needs to be performance tested. I'm sure you can handle it. Oh, by the way, it doesn't use HTTP. Good luck!" What do you do now? (145KB)

• Part 1: Introduction—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  "Beyond Performance Testing" will address what happens after initial test results are collected, the part it takes a human brain to accomplish. We’ll explore what performance test results mean and what can be done to improve them. We’ll focus on performance tuning, the subset of performance engineering that complements performance testing. We’ll examine the process by which software is iteratively tested and tuned with the intent of achieving desired performance, by following an industry-leading performance engineering methodology. (51KB)

• Part 2: A Performance Engineering Strategy—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  This article outlines a strategy that is easily customizable to your project and organization, and that’s been validated by numerous clients worldwide. (93KB)

• Part 3: How Fast is Fast Enough?—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  How do you determine how fast is fast enough for your application, and how do you convert that information into explicit, testable requirements? Those are the topics this article addresses. (113KB)

• Part 4: Accounting for User Abandonment—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  Here in the fourth article of the “Beyond Performance Testing” series, we’ll explore performance-testing issues related to user abandonment and how to account for these issues using the Rational Suite® TestStudio® system testing tool. (102KB)

• Part 5: Determining the Root Cause of Script Failures—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  Here in the fifth article of the “Beyond Performance Testing” series, we’ll take a look at how to analyze script failures with the intent of finding their root cause. (336KB)

• Part 6: Interpreting Scatter Charts—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  This article, the sixth in the “Beyond Performance Testing” series, is an expanded discussion of the scatter chart introduced in Part 6 of the “User Experience, Not Metrics” series. (430KB)

• Part 7: Identify the Critical Failure or Bottleneck—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  This kicks off a four-article theme called “finding bottlenecks to tune.” (121KB)

• Part 8: Modifying Tests to Focus on Failure or Bottleneck Resolution—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  This is the second of four articles on the theme called “finding bottlenecks to tune,” where we’re taking a step beyond just performance testing and beginning to explore how to add real value to the development team. (161KB)

• Part 9: Pinpointing the Architectural Tier of the Failure or Bottleneck—"Beyond Performance Testing"

  This is the third of four articles on the theme called “finding bottlenecks to tune,” where we’re taking the step beyond just performance testing and beginning to explore how to add real value to the development team. (390KB)

• Mobile Computing and Wireless as a Disruptive Technology

  Second in Noblestar's White Paper Series on Digital Business Strategy, this piece walks you through four stories that show it is possible to make the power of a disruptive technology work for your firm. The key is having an informed process for introducing the technology and knowing how to manage it. (51KB)

• Noblestar's Point of View

  A Noblestar point of view on how wireless communications will change the way businesses make money, manage customer relationships, provide value, and learn. (131KB)

• PowerBuilder Architecture - Strategies for a 3-Tier Environment

  The objective of this white paper is to give some guidelines on how best to architect a 3-tier PowerBuilder application. (170KB)

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