ProSeco - TV-broadcasting planning

Problem

ProSeco is intended for TV-broadcasting planning. It involves all planning tasks arising in broadcasting industry: from strategic program planning, through broadcasting planning up to broadcasting operations. ProSeco is a very large project, and it is being developed by two teams (in-house and offshore).

Solution

This project tried a new model of interaction of two development teams. In-house team designed the project, while offshore team performed programming. In-house team consisted of system analysts, architect and designer. Designer was responsible for communication with offshore team. He transformed specified by the design team requirements into technical solutions, documented them and than passed them to our team. At first, technical solution had been specified at a low level (in terms of classes and methods). But step-by-step while offshore team was gaining experience and knowledge of the system, tasks description became less detailed. Volume of communication decreased, while efficiency of work of our team grew. That model proved its efficiency. Designer's activity was crucial for the project development due to his responsibility for inter-team communication. Our team implemented ProSeco server, and partially client side. There implemented several ProSeco clients (Java, WEB). Some of these clients were entirely implemented offshore.

Technical Overview

ProSeco is a client-sever application. Its architecture generally corresponds to J2EE-application architecture, but it also uses components developed at ProSiebenSat.1, for instance:

• Backbone, ORM developed by our customer;
• Juice, which is a Swing extension envelope intended for development of XML-driven GUI;
• DOTS (Data Object Transfer Service), universal persistence layer that uses different adapters to access data from different sources: file system through commercial RDBMS.

Our specialists had to study original components and employ them during development of a complicated server application. ProSeco contains complex data structures; their core consists of TV-broadcasting schedule, advertising pool and its distribution between different TV-channels.