Union Bank of Switzerland

Customer Success Story

When software developers at UBILAB, the research laboratory of Union Bank of Switzerland, built a large object-oriented framework for developing information management applications four years ago, they couldn't find a suitable, commercially available programming environment that was able to load it. So, Walter Bischofberger, a research scientist with UBILAB, worked with his team of experienced engineers to create one.

The result was a fast and flexible development environment that for the first time gave programmers the capability of mixing and matching a variety of UNIX environments, compilers, debuggers and other programming tools. The environment also provides good response times for software systems with up to one million lines of code. Two years ago, UBILAB formed an exclusive partnership with TakeFive Software, GmbH, to evolve and market the programming environment under the name SNiFF+.

Today, SNiFF+ is Union Bank of Switzerland's standard C++ and UNIX programming environment, replacing CenterLine's ObjectCenter. More than 100 engineers are applying it to the development of applications ranging from portfolio management to technical infrastructure systems.

Developers at Union Bank of Switzerland, the largest banking institution in the country, especially rely on SNiFF+'s "fuzzy parser" technology and its graphical user interface to browse through their software systems and gain an overview and understanding.SNiFF+ works even during restructuring phases, when its browsing features are need most urgently. This is the phase when source code is incomplete, inconsistent, and therefore not compilable.

With SNiFF+, developers at Union Bank of Switzerland are productive, spending less time trying to understand the system and more time evolving architectures into flexible and reusable frameworks.

Although Bischofberger says it's difficult to quantify the productivity increase due to SNiFF+, engineers who switched from ObjectCenter to SNiFF+ feel they are much more productive, an effect that becomes more obvious the larger their software systems are.

"One area where we have seen productivity measurements are with students who start working for us with the ET++ application framework," says Bischofberger. "Without SNiFF+, it took them about two months to become productive. With SNiFF+, this time was shortened to about two weeks."

For Union Bank of Switzerland, the SNiFF+ mix and match environment was a breakthrough, because it allows engineers to work in the same environment independent of the hardware, operating system, compiler and debugger they are using.

"If you depend on one vendor, you can't take advantage of the best compilers on the market at any given time," says Bischofberger. "Compilers are still immature, so it's important to have the flexibility to use more than one. For instance, some code works well with one compiler, yet other compilers can diagnose errors better. SNiFF+ is the only environment that lets our developers use two different compilers at a time. This lets us develop software that is much more robust and portable."

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