Since starting in 1996, we've done a lot of stuff. Here are a few of our favorite projects, all of which include recommendations from our clients.

• Bank of America
• bianca.com
• SOMA Living
• Michigan Department of Community Health

Bank of America's Global Corporate Investment Bank

In 2001, Bank of America's Global Corporate Investment Bank was implementing the fifth major version of a large portal that unified a wide spectrum of financial research and market data for high-dollar-value clients. They called Scissor for some architectural advice and assistance with moving to more agile development processes.

But when Scissor principal William Pietri arrived on site, it became clear that schedule pressure made it impossible to tackle those broader issues first. Instead, he put his shoulder to the wheel, helping to kill bugs, fix performance problems, and write new code. When the deadline was past, he made extensive recommendations about both architecture and process and stayed to help implement the first of them.

See what the head of the architecture team has to say about our work.

Bianca.com

biancaTroll Productions launched the first community site on the World Wide Web in February, 1994. That site, bianca.com, won a Webby in 1997 and was nominated again in 1998. For many years, Scissor has provided them with a variety of technology assistance, including

• Porting a major service, drawing more than 500,000 hits a day, from C and Perl to Java Servlets and Java Server Pages while training Bianca staff in object-oriented design and Java development;
• Setting up extensive automatic service quality monitoring and handing it off to internal staff;
• Optimizing server and network performance so that bianca.com can handle millions of hits each day on very modest hardware; and
• Auditing and tightening network and operating system security.

See what Bianca’s founder has to say about our work.

SOMA Living

Pacific Union is San Francisco’s largest independent real estate broker, handling over thirty percent of all property transactions in the bay area. In 1998 they launched a new venture, called SOMA Living, which is a high-tech, customer-focused real estate store, intended to give customers more involvement in and control over the home purchase process. To provide a seamless experience for buyers, they needed a set of integrated software tools that would let customers and employees access data both in and out of the store. Scissor worked extensively on the first version of this site, providing

• Design and development of the back-end database and the code for fetching, caching, and using that data on the site;
• A flexible and robust layer for monitoring local real estate data and synchronizing SOMA Living data;
• A variety of administrative tools for maintenance and data grooming; and
• Training of technical staff on use and maintenance of system.

See what the project manager has to say about our work.

Michigan Department of Community Health

The state of Michigan offers a wide variety of programs to provide medical assistance to various groups. Unfortunately, the eligibility rules for these programs are so complex that it takes an expert to figure out which programs a person might qualify for. In 1999, Scissor worked on a pilot project to create software to assist in the screening process, so that people could quickly and easily discover what programs they were likely to be eligible for. For this project, Scissor

• Analyzed hundreds of pages of governmental eligibility rules for nearly a dozen programs;
• Extensively interviewed domain experts, carefully seeking to balance ease of use with screening accuracy;
• Helped created a complex set of interview questions and evaluation rules;
• Coded the rules in a special language peculiar to the screening package used; and
• Presented the results to a variety of interested parties, both technical and non-technical.

See what the project manager has to say about our work.