NEC Corporation, the leading global enterprise specializing in the IT and network business fields started operations in Japan in 1899. It has 24,871 employees and together with its more than 40 subsidiaries, this number goes up to over 142,000 employees worldwide.
NEC Informatec Systems is the group's company whose main mission is to provide high quality solutions for all software processes in order to support the operation of NEC Corporation.
Challenges With the aim of automating development and improving productivity, in early March 2010 they embarked on an evaluation process to compare the results obtained with GeneXus to those obtained with a solution manually developed in Java.
The project selected for the evaluation was measured in thousands of lines of code and months of programming work.
Variables used to evaluate GeneXus:
• Productivity
• Quality of the generated code
• Power of the UI
• Level of learning achieved
Results:
• Productivity: The comparison made using functional points showed that the application developed with GeneXus X Evolution 1 allowed for a 45% productivity increase compared to the traditional method (without taking the application analysis into account).
• Quality: Specific tests were applied to the code in order to analyze the weaknesses of the generated code, and finally it was reported that it met the standards required by the Corporation.
• Level of learning achieved: To examine the level of learning achieved, a one-week training course was provided. Results showed that the degree of learning achieved after one week was similar to or even higher than that achieved with training classes in Java. A major difference was established after two or three weeks, when the skills level of non-technical people was much higher than that achieved with manual programming in Java. In summary, a non-specialist developer can take a one-week course, use GeneXus for two or three weeks and reach the same level of productivity as a specialist.
• Power of the UI: The UI was examined to determine if the interfaces developed were rich, full-featured, multi-language, modern, and so on. The designers involved were able to deliver the expected look & feel with response times and performance that matched the levels required by the company.
The application to record hours worked per project that was used in the GeneXus evaluation was moved to production in October, 2010 with more than 1000 concurrent users. It is expected that the number of users will be increased to 6 thousand in the first quarter of 2011.