Our approach to software development is generally a top-down, modern waterfall or "spiral" development approach, with prototyping practiced liberally whenever feasible. We utilize modern structured analysis and design in much of our development because it naturally supports the modeling of a systemÍs data and time-dependent behavior, and many of our projects involve data-intensive, real-time applications. An object-oriented design approach based on the OMT (Object Modeling Technique) has been used on projects that are appropriate candidates for definition and specification in terms of objects and their relationship to each other and to the outside world.

The key to creating successful software lies in the ability to optimize communications between developers and customers, developers and end-users, developers and management, and even developers and other developers. Internally, we strive to achieve this at the coding level by establishing and enforcing a coding standard. To ensure that our software exhibits good documentation, clarity, cohesion, and consistency, our coding standard provides guidelines in the areas of system hierarchy and source file rules, commenting, naming conventions, language usage, data declarations, layout, and defensive programming. An internally-developed editing tool has been implemented that automates many of the layout requirements set forth in the coding standard. Code reviews are performed regularly to evaluate and enforce compliance with the coding standard.