System development

The Software Development and Maintenance unit can help develope software, applications and other IT solutions to support your working processes, be those large or small.

By choosing to partner with the IT department for your system development projects, you’ll benefit the collective experience here at SLU. Many researchers, institutions and administrative units have placed their confidence in the department to support their activities with IT solutions. Many of the business requirements we face are often actually quite similar despite coming from different fields of research, environmental monitoring etc. Therefore our system development projects always reflect on what has been achieved previously.

Take a look through our system showcase where we present a selection of the systems we’ve developed.

With the term system development we mean to develope an information system from scratch, but also to implement and adapt existing or third party systems. The unit developes system which can:

• Support, facilitate and simplify working processes such as course management, staff administration or management information.
• Facilitate data collection. Examples include field computers with specialised applications, web portals for citizen science, integration of data loggers in environmental monitoring and integration with third party technical systems in clinical labs, animal stables etc.
• Support and organise your data management. This may concern storage in supervised file shares, databases or integrated systems, as well as data transfer, transformations and processing. Making data available continues to gain focus today. This may mean restricting access to a small group of users, or making APIs for other systems and services to consume, or publishing download portals and other web services for open data. Our experience ranges from helping the single researcher to organise their data, to helping institutions meet their obligations as appointed national data hosts.
• Present and visualise your data, results and information. We develope advanced web sites, either for SLU’s collective webs or standalone, targeting students, employees and the public. We develope rich applications for desktop as well as mobile applications for Iphone and Android. We manage report services for periodic formal reports as well as self-service portals for on-demand and user definable reports.
• Take advantage of our collective and proactive work regards data security, helping you fulfil obligations due to applicable legal frameworks and requirements.

Areas of expertise within system development

In system development many areas of expertise may be required. Among others, our expertise is found within:

Process modelling
A good understanding of the business process to be supported, and modelling that to an information model is key to providing suitable support. We can help with this.

Requirement gathering and management
We can help you define and document the requirements your business and your users have on the system.

Data modelling
Together with you, we establish the forms, connections and relationships within your systems information so data can be stored efficiently in a database or other format making it is useful to both the system and further ambition.

Database design
We design databases based on the data model appropriate for your requirements.

System architecture
Based on the establish requirements the information system needs to meet, we can construct a plan of the necessary components and services required in the system, and how these will interact with each other.

Usability design
Together with system users, we design and establish a most useable solution for system interaction. We also assure compliance with legal and other guidelines regarding accessibility.

IT and information security
We keep ourselves updated on SLU’s and outside requirements, routines and laws regarding IT security, while working with correctness, confidentiality and availability in the systems.

Software progamming
In programming we implement the requirements and architecture in the form of executable parts of the system such as applications, web sites, services and scripts.

Test
We design, prepare and carry out functional tests of the system, and we can help you to organise and perform acceptance and practical tests.

Test management
Test leads can help plan, lead and follow up testing.

Our typical work method

First contact is an open opportunity to discuss your needs and address any general questions. On proceeding with us to help develop your system, the first step is to identify and document the particular working processes you want to support with IT.

At a given scale of development, it is normal that we run the development in project form. We do this to appropriate time for our system developers and other resources at the IT department, and just as importantly for participating resources on the client side of the project.

We have an agile approach in our development projects, meaning we can adapt to changing conditions or circumstances. We work with regular partial deliveries, tests and client meetings for feedback.

We utilise experienced project leaders from the IT department’s Project office who can plan, lead and organise using proven methods so the project goals are delivered on time and in budget.