Agile development, microservices, APIs and DevOps are state-of-the-art gold standards for your digital systems and products. Deployed correctly, your IT can drive and accelerate innovation. Our four methodical approaches and threads unfold and intertwine, complementing and augmenting each other. ARS can help you draw on these powerful services wherever you need them to reach your digital solution goals.
The ARS Golden 4
Agile development
Teams work independently. Only independent teams who are not slowed down by red tape or dependencies can help your product or solution reach its maximum potential. Being part of an independent team also increases employee satisfaction in companies. So you need to create teams that bring together the necessary expertise: experts with specialist knowledge, plus T-shaped professionals who are used to working together across disciplines. The team takes responsibility for its own solution or product, collaborates with other teams via clear interfaces, and develops efficient patterns of cooperation.
Microservices
Microservices provide a foundation for secure modularisation, allowing you to develop, scale and deploy the elements of a larger system flexibly and independently. This improves time-to-market and shortens the lead time for new functions. Microservices can be further developed independently by agile teams. The complexity that comes with microservices is only manageable with a high degree of automation and a flourishing DevOps culture.
APIs
APIs are the key to collaboration in companies, and to opening up their services to the outside. They are oriented to customer needs, whether internally or externally. And they need to be reusable, maintainable, expandable and cloud-ready. Security and governance are key issues for managing APIs, because when opening systems to the outside, you need to keep a tight rein on the security of your IT and your company.
DevOps
DevOps encourages everyone to keep an eye on the big picture for the success of a product or solution, including the whole development process and later operation, and to take on responsibility for this. Short cycles in development, deployment and operations, plus regular feedback in all directions, create stability, minimise risk and increase quality. This acceleration is only possible when the build, deployment, infrastructure and operating processes are highly automated. And company cultures must also be transformed, so that DevOps principles can be practised within and between teams.
Our services
Modernising monoliths
Every company, if it’s not a start-up, has existing systems that have grown over years or even decades. And there often comes a time when you need to make bold modernisation choices. ARS can help you bring your existing software into the cloud era, with strategies that work for your company. There are different approaches. Perhaps you’ll update existing platforms with DevOps, use bridge technologies to outsource extensions to an existing system, or break up a monolith completely or in part. We can help you discover the best strategy for your systems and support you as you implement it.
Introducing DevOps
ARS has a great deal of experience in implementing DevOps in companies. Sometimes, advances in DevOps begin with automation initiatives and later extend to include infrastructure, development processes, collaboration between teams and the necessary cultural transformation within the company. This boosts product stability and scalability, as well as employee satisfaction. ARS is also skilled in implementing DevOps from the top down, in other words, with initiatives that apply DevOps principles to make direct changes to a company’s culture and way of working. In both cases, top-down and bottom-up initiatives end up meeting in the middle, because that’s the only way they can truly succeed.
APIs for products
Every company that’s been around for a while has APIs in its IT systems that are highly valuable and can become even more beneficial to the company if they are well managed and people know about them. This can be achieved through appropriate management of the APIs within the company. And the external API market is also becoming an option for many organisations, thanks to increasing digital connections between companies (B2B), plus increased opening up of APIs for third parties. ARS can help you anchor your API management in such a way that your company can also offer APIs externally as high-value products.
Agile development with DevOps
ARS helps large and small companies make their software engineering transformation-ready, using agile methods and DevOps principles. So that IT can provide your business with the means and the pace to implement new business ideas at speed. We ease the way for mature software development to become cloud-native software engineering, whether you’re heading for the cloud tomorrow or want to prepare a firm foundation for the coming months or years.