How We Work

Agile software development

We decided to use agile techniques in our projects. Agile is a common name for a set of practices raising pressure on direct communication in a software teams and focusing on iterative software development.

These methods are intended primarily for teams where there is the possibility of easy communication (talks and discussions around the team), so there is no need to create a large number of formalized procedures.

This allows for easier understanding of issues and minimizing the implementation risks in the short time to market projects, but it requires a well-organized, skilled and stable team.

Business value and quality

Agile methods focus primarily on the quality and business value of a product delivered to the customer. In our projects we use short (typically 2 weeks) iterations to produce successive versions of software.

During each iteration our team strictly implements the objectives set out by the customer. It's the customer who selects the elements of the system, which he wants to see in the first place, and which are the most important for his business.

We always try to deliver a working software as soon as possible, preferably starting from the second iteration. Each iteration gives our customer a set of complete functions (from the user point of view) defined by the so-called user stories.

Requirements analysis that you can understand

User story is a description of the system requirements made from the user's perspective. Each user story is clear for both the client and the team of developers. It does not contain unnecessary technical details and is the basis for designating the direction of the project and tracking progress.

Thanks to user stories customer no longer needs to go through the heavy technical specifications, which are usually not understandable to him. This misunderstanding is also later referred by the contractors to hide their own mistakes.

We want our customers to understand well what we are about to implement for them and we also want to understand exactly what are their needs.

Project state transparency

In our projects we care about transparency at every stage. Our clients have a permanent insight into the work plan and the state of implementation of user stories. After each iteration we present the results of our work based on actual operating system. Customers can verify the completion of each scheduled user story, make their comments and concerns. After each iteration customer has also the right to amend the plan for the following iterations.

The customer, not the developers, decide what is most important for him at any given time. Such a short cycle makes it easier to capture and to correct any discrepancies between the vision and the implementation of the system. This results in a product that our customers are more satisfied with.

We avoid the one-time control of the whole work only at the end of the project. It saves many misunderstandings and allows our customers to sleep calmly.

Reacting to change

An additional advantage of the iterative process we use is that it is easier for us to react to changes in requirements. Each new iteration can introduce new, not previously planned user stories. Such a change could broaden the scope of the project or replace other user story having a similar workload, which, however, can be found as less valuable to the customer.

Again it's the client who decides whether to broaden the scope (which involves the expansion of the project budget) or to maintain the budget for the originally projected level and to remove non-essential items from the product backlog.

In any case, the customer receives more efficient use of their money.

Current information always available

All the time during the project our customers have access to the current test version of the system as well as an on-line access to our proprietary agile management system tinyPM (www.tinypm.com) where they can track the progress of our work.

Our client is a member of the team, so we require him to engage in further stages of work. But at the end all this makes our projects successful.

If you need more information, don't hesitate to contact us.