proServices Corporate History

The first large contract the company received was a code documentation job for Continental Insurance Company, now CNA, Inc. The company was making an investment in a software technology and wanted to protect the risk by having a copy of the source code documentation. The source was approximately 2 million lines of "C" source code with a large number of subsystems. Within three weeks the complete system was documented with inheritance diagrams, call trees, and data dictionaries. This entire job was performed in a factory context and process running two shifts out of the basement of our original factory Foreman's home. The delivery was made in a four-drawer filing cabinet with some 70 bond folders individually tabbed by subsystem containing over 7000 sheets of documentation. When delivered, the Vice President of Engineering commented, "This has been the easiest documentation job I've ever done!" Thus starting the whole idea of providing a factory service to support software development tasks and provide peace of mind to our customers.

Like any new business, proServices has had its fair share of challenges. The company's founders decided to finance the company on the profitability of its balance sheet instead of the traditional venture funding debt balance sheet approach. The concept of a software factory was not always understood or accepted by the software development community. However, the founders knew automation tools were mostly bought by developers as new toys and the more sophisticated these tools became the less likely companies were to make a long-term commitment towards real process improvement to leverage their benefits. The nature of the beast was "a little dab will do ya" and so the real productivity hits were never realized by organizations that ran out of time, effort, and patience. In addition, the automation tools themselves were not at a level of quality to be integrated in a true commercial environment with real processes. The final source for desperate adoption of automation tools resides in the development organization within the dissection of the engineering process itself. The resistance to automation to avoid human effort has always run orthogonal to the notion and common belief by developers that software development is an art form.

During the mid 90's the company landed contracts which provided it with a clearance status being initially sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA). ProServices has maintained this relationship and has billets, which has allowed the company to work in Top Secret environments. Its expertise on software process allow for a unique partnership between the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (SEI CMU) and the company (see white papers). The SEI Capability Maturity Model process improvement initiative dominated the majority of the work reformed during this time. It was an interesting turn of events, which wrote the next chapters in the company's history.

Brian Gill-Price, the technical founder, had been looking for a process for years to eliminate highly error prone techniques associated with the human developer model for doing quality assessment/audits. He knew the advantage of automation tooling would allow for the mundane tasks suspect of human error to be efficiently executed leveraging such technologies. The answer came in the form of scripting languages and a standard semantic static language available through a commercial tool. Mr. Gill-Price was aware of the existence of such technologies having first founded a company providing such technologies in 1988. This notion of quality assessment/audit automation was first conceived with an old Hughes Aircraft division, which was building the Earth to Orbit System (EOS) for NASA. The contract was to find all occurrences, within a 1 million-line system, where error handling had not been correctly connected to the source code. Using Factory techniques, automation, and custom scripts proved successful in both the results and the cost reduction of replacing labor with automation. As other contracts followed, it turned out these same methods and processes fueled the growth of the company. In particular during the Y2K crisis, proServices was a major contractor to many companies in the financial services industry such as: JP Morgan, Solomon Smith Barney, and the Federal Reserve. Also the company's Y2K expertise was utilized assessing and auditing the NSA code base of "C" based systems deemed to be mission critical.

During the latter part of the 1990's the concept of performing this work offsite in a factory context, connected by secure communications to the customer facility became increasingly accepted by the market. The impetus behind this acceptance was the Y2K effort requiring companies to view the source code as a component, which could be shipped to a site worked on and imported back to the customer in a "sanitized" version. The process methodology, automation tooling, and custom scripts all played a major part in the factory evolution and continue to be the differentiator of the company's ability to deliver results.

Today, proServices is headquartered in a 10,000 square-foot factory in Trenton, New Jersey. It provides the company with versatility to offer services by remote login and importing code from the customer. Customers enjoy the capacity of having Memory Leak Detection, Performance Tuning, Error Detection, Quality Assessment/Audit, COE Assessment/Audit, Test Coverage Analysis, and Darwin Testing all being done by one company under one roof. The automation tooling technology can be exported with the finished product and the results of the completed effort. The factory provides Peace of Mind available in a 24/7/365 environment. The factory has a Secured Compartmented Facility (SCF) for Top Secret work and production lines, which take a similar approach for commercial work. The results - happy customers and a growing list of factory advocates.

Today's customers enjoy the benefits of the Internet by allowing the Centralized unique skill set in a factory to provide a commodity like approach to the growing need for additional developer manpower in a tight labor market. The concepts of peforming work using this factory model have been proven over ten years and can be franchised to the customer for internal implementation. This year the company plans to roll out additional services such as video conferencing capabilities to enhance our customer's experience of work in process, interpretation of the results, and every day communication.