Software Development

For more than 15 years we have been developing professional software solutions for the environmental field, especially tools for corporate environmental activities (industrial ecology). Among these are IT applications for modeling of material and energy flow systems, for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and process optimisation. Furthermore we are specialized in database applications in related areas such as waste, energy, water, environmental protection. We also implement Environmental Information Systems (EIS). 

Our software solutions can be found mainly in producing industries. Also, consulting companies, research institutions and public authorities are using our IT tools.  

Next to standard software we also offer tailored software solutions (bepsoke software) for individual customers. To this end, we do a comprehensive requirements analysis together with the customer, and cooperatively develop a requirements specification. We favor a participative software development process, where the client (the future user of the application) is actively involved and receives prototypes and preliminary versions at an early stage to ensure that his feedback is incorporated in the regular software development process.

Our applications are mainly implemented for the Windows operating systems. We put a strong focus on software ergonomics issues, such as correctness, reliability and usability.

We are using state-of-art software development tools and environments (e.g Visual Studio, NAnt, Continous Integration) and use Microsoft .NET as a base technology. Additionally, we have developed the Empinia framework, which can be used for efficient development of new applications. Empinia is an open source project, with ifu Hamburg as a project leader and maintainer of the code.

Modern software development methods, such as object-oriented modeling with UML, are part of our routinely used instruments in our projects. Of course we are using testing environments and versioning tools. In the software development process, we emphasize agile software development concepts, such as Scrum.

High attention is paid to extensibility, maintenance and documentation of program code, in order to ensure the future development of a software product for the customer.

A selection of software development projects we have successfully completed in cooperation with our customers can be found in the references section.