INTSPEI stands for the International Software & Productivity Engineering Institute. The company is organized around two basic philosophies of technology and people. At INTSPEI people are the power and their synergy, knowledge and skills are the basis of all our undertakings in software engineering. We have developed a team of the brightest, most talented people in the world. In technology, we strive to provide services and products that are completely revolutionary thinking, of the highest possible quality and present them to our clients with absolute integrity.
The primary product of INTSPEI is INTSPEI P-Modeling Framework with Reverse Semantic Traceability. We believe this revolutionary product will change the face of software development industry.
The origins of INTSPEI P-Modeling Framework come from "The Babel Experiment" designed by Vladimir L. Pavlov in 2001 as a training program for software engineering students.
This experiment was done in the following manner:
A team of students was assigned the task of designing a software system with one very challenging restriction perimeter. In this case, UML was the only language allowed for communication while working on the project. Any verbal or written communication involving natural languages was forbidden. The premise was intended to make students go through a "condensed" version of communication problems typical for software development and gain the experience of applying UML to successfully overcome these problems. For students the event was presented as an experiment, aimed at determining whether UML is a "real" language, sufficient for a full range of communications.
The experiment was an astounding success. As an experiment it demonstrated that students always developed clear and concise, high quality models - without any usage of "regular" language, using only UML for communication. As a training, it helped students recognize the real value of UML and gain deep experience in modeling. It was repeated dozens of times in both academic and industrial environments and always generated fantastic feedback.
Once during a design session there were accidentally two independent teams working on the same task. The communication means of the first team was restricted to UML as described above, while the other team was allowed to communicate verbally using a natural language. It turned out that the first, more restricted team, succeeded in performing the task with a greater efficiency than the other team. The UML diagrams created by the first team were more sound, detailed, readable, elaborated, and elegant. It strongly suggested there was a lot more "uncharted territory" in applications for UML than it was previously assumed.
Subsequently, Vladimir L. Pavlov conducted a number of additional experiments intended to reveal whether the "silent" modeling sessions are more productive than the traditional ones. In all these experiments, silent teams were at least as efficient as the others. However, in most cases the silent teams clearly outperformed the traditional ones. Our interpretation is the crucial reasons for such an increase in performance lie in the following:
 | The restriction on using a natural language stimulates creativity of the designers as well as forces them to stay focused on their job; |
| Work in speechless mode forces designers to explicitly uncover all underlying assumptions at the very early stages of the design process; |
| UML is no longer treated as a superfluous burden irrelevant to real-life needs (as a "write-only" language) - instead, the designers begin to demonstrate greater concern about the quality and readability of their models. |
The impressive successes of these experiments motivated many of the participants to return to their companies and begin implementation of Speechless Modeling into their engineering processes.
Afterward, ideas were constructed for conducting additional new experiments with the specific intention of finding a method to compare UML to natural languages. The premise in these experiments was to set up forward (from a natural language to UML) and backward (from UML to the natural language) "translation" tasks for two teams of professional software designers. This would be done with one team performing the forward translation and the other one performing the backward translation. The intention was to observe how closely the outcome of the backward translation resembled the original text, thus providing verification of correctness of UML model.
The experiments confirmed again that, for information describing software systems, UML has more than sufficient power of expression required to maintain the model's content. Texts obtained after the backward translation from UML were semantically equivalent to the original.
The most important conclusion of these experiments went far beyond the ideas of variables of linguistic applications. The experiments suggested the model of the entire software development cycle existed as a series of translations. Why not then extend the backward testing to the other translations created throughout the development cycle? In subsequent experiments this backward translation verification has been unquestionably demonstrated as a reliable method to help guarantee deliverables of each development step do not lose, or have misinterpreted, anything that was produced at the previous step. Architects and software developers who have participated in Vladimir's experiments started to practice the backward translation verification method in their companies providing fantastic feedback. This methodology has been named "Reverse Semantic Traceability." It has proven to be a solid second part completion to the INTSPEI P Modeling Framework.
INTSPEI P-Modeling Framework was only a beginning point for the company. Today research experiments are constantly moving forward. One of the major objectives of INTSPEI is to continue experiments in the outer-most areas of software development thinking. Areas that will result in more than advancement of development methodologies, but extreme advancement of computer technologies at all levels. At INTSPEI, this is more than a stated scientific purpose, it is a deeply-seated passion. This passion will be what defines our future company history. This is the basis of our motto:
