It is the area that gathers the skills related to the production of software intended as a comprehensive systemic approach to governance of the entire software life cycle, from the definition and specification of the requirements to be implemented to the continuous monitoring of operating performance. SER&Practices due to its genesis and the nature of university spin off born from a research laboratory in software engineering, uses numerous development processes with mastery and awareness, from Waterfall to Agile, depending on the characteristics of the project to be carried out and needs of the customers to whom it addresses, being able to adapt quickly to the latter if necessary, integrating perfectly into their processes and development teams. The production of software nowadays is no longer a mere activity of writing more or less functional code, but it is an organic process of the company itself and as such must be organized, disciplined and governed. SER&Practices already does all this for its software development projects and, of course, has the skills to do it also for the projects of its customers and partners. In addition to an in-depth knowledge of the major development paradigms, quality-oriented design principles and guidelines for code security-oriented development, SER&Practices also provides a series of complementary skills often overlooked by those who develop software especially in the phase planning:

• Ability to select languages, design / development patterns, the best architectures for solving the problem
• Ability to scout technology, libraries, third-party services to support development. The success of a software production project depends to a large extent on the basic components that you intend to use
• Ability to introduce commonly used technologies in some areas in others completely different
• Ability to regulate the software development process according to the Project Management and Resource Management methodologies
• Ability to quickly intervene even on software not directly produced by the company for re-engineering, migration to new architectures or system integration

The services provided by the company within this area are as follows:

• Design and development of service oriented architectures (SOA) and / or based on micro-services
• Design and development of immersive X-Reality applications (Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality)
• Design and development of applications based on cognitive services (Artificial Intelligence, NLP, Document Search & Crawling, etc …)
• WEB application design and development
• Design and development of APP for mobile devices
• Reengineering of legacy applications and migration to Modern Architecture
• Design and development of IoT solutions for adaptive monitoring

In the context of an increasingly competitive global and local market, quality management becomes an indispensable requirement, constituting an element of differentiation from unqualified competition, acting as a strategic commercial tool capable of improving the organization’s image and credibility. The definition of quality is not, nor can it be, unambiguous, as it is now known that it must be defined with respect to the ability of a product or process to satisfy the needs, expressed or latent, of consumers and / or customers. The application of quality in software products has taken on a central role also thanks to the awareness that it is cheaper to avoid making mistakes than to try to eliminate them at the end of the production process. In this way, the costs to be attributed to errors are minimized as soon as the company is able to continuously manage and improve the processes from the point of view of quality, mitigating the causes of the defects identified in the software products. SER & Practices has cultivated high-profile skills in this regard both by virtue of its proximity to research environments on software engineering and thanks to the international collaborations and partnerships launched, such as that with the University of Castilla La Mancha and AQCLab, which have made the company involved and informed of all developments related to the family of ISO 25000 standards and in some cases protagonists, as for ISO25012 and ISO25024, in the definition of methods and in the development of data quality assessment tools. SER&Practices was the first company in Italy and the fourth in Europe to certify a software product. The quality assessment services provided by the company are:

• Product quality. The output of the product quality assessment service consists of a report showing the quality status of the product analyzed.
  • standard ISO/IEC 25010:2011.
  • Products used: Kiuwan; Micro Focus Fortify;
• Process quality. The service can be used on several levels which provide the following outputs in ascending order: production of a map of the interventions; design of the new process; evaluation of the new process; institutionalization plan of the results. 
  • Standard: Quality Management Standard ISO 9001:2015, ISO 15504 ecc
  • Products used: GQM; QIP; Metric sheets.

Project management is becoming increasingly complex as a direct effect of the technological turbulence, the transversality of the domains on which the projects focus and the dimensions of the project initiatives themselves. The complexity of the projects is therefore a multidimensional and articulated space that requires specific skills and proven skills. Research and development projects in particular, even more those financed from public funds, are at the top of the complexity since they add to the normal critical ones those connected: to the uncertainty of the results, since these must be the result of research whose results are all the more uncertain how much more research is frontier; the difficulty of estimating times, costs and resources with reference to objectives to be achieved which are difficult to specify; the criticality of the management of highly qualified personnel and development teams; to find suitable skills for the research to be conducted; looking for sources of funding; the preparation of applications for funded calls and the reporting of the activities carried out, which notoriously require the compilation of forms and forms that are extremely complex and often distant from company practices; cash problems that can be determined during implementation.

SER&Practices was born as a subject suited to industrial research and the preparation and implementation of complex research projects. He immediately gained prominent skills in this area, creating an internal Project Management Office, a structure responsible for managing internal projects which, subsequently, thanks to his successes, also began to operate on behalf of third parties in favor of numerous customers, for which it actually implements a turnkey management of project initiatives.

Over time, the Company has adopted its own approach to project management which, inspired by the PMBOK of the Project Management Institute and focused on research and development projects, involves the use of ad hoc processes of Start-up, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Control and Closing, as well as document templates, checklists and work management tools. It internally develops skills in the three main areas of Project Management, namely, Technical Project Management, Leadership and Strategic and Business Management, skills that it continuously updates thanks also to the collaboration of some of its founding members with the Project Management Institute Southern Italy Chapter (PMI -SIC) and the joint organization and participation in dissemination and professional updating events promoted by the PMI.

The company also develops skills useful for the introduction of Project Management in diversified production contexts, typically represented by small and medium-sized enterprises that intend to enhance their management skills. In this context, it also has its own Lean approach to project management called PMStart which streamlines planning to the extreme by focusing on 4 focal elements, the What, When Who and How (WWWH), making it particularly suitable for Startups or immature contexts. PMStart can, if necessary, be instrumented through tools to help manage software projects.

This area of ​​competence also becomes strategic on the market also in light of the current regulatory framework which, acknowledging the importance of knowing how to decompose and face today’s complexity, pushes towards the acquisition of skills and competences aimed at project management, such as for example, the case of UNI 11648: 2016 standards – Requirements of knowledge, skills and competence of the Project Manager and UNI ISO 21500: 2013 – Guide to project management (Project Management) and the new Public Contracts Code pursuant to Legislative Decree 50/2016 and of the ANAC Guidelines n.3 / 2016 and subsequent updates that require for the RUP (Sole Manager of the Procedure) to possess “adequate training in the field of Project Management”.

The services provided by the company within this area are, among others, the following:

definition of the project idea, search for sources of funding, drafting of the project or application, assistance in relations with funding bodies, planning of the initiative, support during the execution phase, monitoring, control and closure of the project, Project Office services, targeted training for CAPM and PMP certification preparation