TLC, Mobile & Embedded Applications

ONION consultancy in telecommunications & embedded systems

The experience matured in this field, in collaboration with some of the largest industrial groups in Italy, has allowed Onion to define services that cover many aspects of Software Engineering:

• Analysis
  • The Analysis phase can be decomposed in activities like feasibility analysis, analysis and application modeling, and requirements' analysis
• Design
  • Consultancy in ISO 9001:2000 certification
• Development
  • This typically consists in the realization of one or more programs in a specified programming language, and with the aid of various operating systems
• Testing
• Program&Project MGMT
• Process Improvement

These aspects can be applied in relation to the reference model used:

• Waterfall
• V-Model
• Incremental
• Spiral
• Agile (SCRUM)

Some of the main experiences of Onion are developed in mobile networks and industrial automation systems.

Analysis

In software engineering the analysis is one of the software life cycle phases; its scope is to clarify, detail and document the functions, the services and the performances that must be offered by a software system or program in order to solve a specific problem in a specific context. The information collected in the analysis phase represents the starting point for the design of a software product and for the entire process of its development, validation and maintenance.

The methods and tools used for the analysis depend on the chosen methodology. In case of object-oriented analysis, for example, the tools can include notations like UML that allow the description of the application domain and how the system must interact with the domain in terms of classes, relations among classes, and other typical concepts of object-oriented development.

Design

The design phase foresees the architectural design, in which the overall structure of the system in terms of the main modules and of the macroscopic relations between them is defined. To this level of design belong formulas like client-server or three-tier, or more general decisions on the use of specific hardware architectures, operating systems, DBMS, network protocols, etc. Later on the decomposition of the system into modules is defined, representing the system with a modality closer to the code.

Development

The largest part of embedded systems are designed in order to repeatedly execute an action to a limited cost, with high performance requirements and significant interactions with specifically-designed hardware.

The technologies that better guarantee the performance of an embedded system are the real-time operating systems (pSoS, WxWorks, Linux, .) and the programming languages (C, C++, PLC, .), that have fast execution cycles and allow an effective interaction with the hardware.

Telecommunication Systems

Onion has developed significant experiences in the main Telecommunication systems.

GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS

Industrial Automation Systems