Copyright © 2007 SoftVelocity, All rights reserved worldwide

User Technology Associates (UTA) is an award-winning information technology organization that delivers services and product solutions to customers in the governmental and commercial arenas. They, like many companies are constantly scrambling to hire enough developers to handle their urgent information technology needs. The shortage of IT development talent is a serious crisis but IT executives have identified two solutions: increase the number of skilled programmers or increase the productivity of existing staff.

UTA's Solution

UTA selected Clarion software to solve their programmer shortage.

"The only real solution is to increase the productivity of every developer in order to meet client needs cheaper, better and faster. We’ve learned that Clarion enables programmers to be significantly more productive than many competitive tools. That’s why our staff has adopted Clarion as our preferred development tool," said Yong K. Kim, UTA’s Chief Executive Officer.

SoftVelocity and UTA have formed a strategic relationship through which UTA plans to bring the power and productivity of the Clarion application development toolset to their 800-member development staff. In addition, UTA will be promoting the use of Clarion throughout its nationwide client base by offering Clarion training courses at the UTA Institute of Technology (U.I.T.), and estimates that 1,000 non-UTA developers will begin using Clarion after training at the U.I.T.

The Tool

UTA is sold on Clarion's productivity.

"Clarion has enabled us to develop applications that blow the competition away. We sell the features that our competition plans to develop," said Mike Pickus, Director of Information Engineering for UTA Business Systems. "Our customers would be shocked at how few developers we assign to their projects. We deliver comprehensive point-of-sale suites for Fortune 1000 Companies with just a few Clarion developers. Our rule of thumb is to expect one Clarion developer to produce a better product than ten Visual Basic developers.

"Because Clarion applications are so easy to maintain and customize, we offer off-the-shelf applications that we customize to satisfy the customers’ needs. With Clarion’s template system, we make the adjustments almost instantly. We have yet to experience a program that we could not develop using Clarion. It is the total package," Pickus said.

"A widely accepted and accurate way to measure size of a software project is Function Point Analysis (FPA)," said Mike Pasley, Senior Technologist at UTA.

FPA is a metric used by development firms to estimate production schedules and staffing requirements. The metric also reaffirms UTA’s decision to adopt Clarion as their development tool of choice. Users of FPA evaluate a software development project and identify key aspects of the application (inputs, outputs, queries, logical data groupings, etc.). Each aspect is assigned a number of function points and the values are tallied up resulting in a function point total based upon the number of procedures. With the total in hand, a development firm can accurately estimate how long the application will take to develop and how many developers must be assigned to the project to meet the deadline.

FPA also addresses the quality of application development tools. On average, a Windows client/server programmer can develop applications at a rate of twelve function points per month. Clarion enables developers to be vastly more productive.

"An average Clarion programmer can easily produce over twelve function points per day," Pasley said.

Clarion offers a tremendous competitive advantage and leading software development firms — such as UTA — are tapping into the benefits of Clarion in order to continue impressive growth. Knowing their developers are using the most productive tool, companies using Clarion can calmly react to the programmer shortages with a winning solution.

Copyright © 2007 SoftVelocity, All rights reserved worldwide