Our Agile Approach

We want you to be comfortable working with us and to prove that we get things done quickly, efficiently and without fuss. To this end, our method is designed to start quickly and easily and to give you total control over the project, its cost and progress.

We use proven agile development methods, including Scrum, feature-driven development, test-driven development and agile programming techniques.

Project Scoping

We start with a scoping exercise, typically lasting up to a few days, without any charge to you or obligation to continue afterwards. The scoping activity allows us to spend time with the principal business and IT sponsors. You tell us about the business objectives and the project requirement. We learn more about the environment in which you operate, both business and IT. The output from this activity is a "project brief" document. The document contains a description of the project, what is in and out of scope, the likely team structure, a list of stakeholders, any issues or risks already identified, and a plan for the next activity.

You are free to use this document as you see fit. It is obviously our hope that you will choose to continue working with us on the remainder of the project.

Enterprise Agile

Where the application to be built is simple, using development technologies you already have in place, we go straight into release one. However, for many enterprise applications there are additional considerations:- application interfaces, complex requirements &/or processing needs or the project is introducing new technology into your environment. In these cases, we conduct a solution design activity.

Solution design is a short (typically one to two weeks) activity to start the project on a firm foundation. Buy-in is sought from stakeholders such as your technical architecture team, project office, business users and governance officers. The high level technical design is produced. Technical standards such as coding rules are confirmed.

Release One

At this point in the project the remainder of the team is assembled and work starts on the requirements gathering, design, coding, testing and delivery of the first iteration. The scope of this iteration is set by (or at the very least with the consent of) business users.

We normally produce the first release within four weeks. This gives all parties the confidence that this is a project that is delivering.

Extensive use is made of user workshops, storyboards and informal prototyping in order to better capture user requirements and produce a viable, usable solution.

The first iteration concentrates on the core of the application, producing user screens, workflow and the heart of the database. The work we do produces a firm foundation for the application and the remainder of the project, one that allows us to build flexibly further requirements.

Application code development is "test-driven". This means tests to ensure quality of the code are written before the code itself. A set of tests that all fail (red) at the beginning of the iteration gradually turn green through the life of the iteration, giving both a very public indicator of progress and extremely high quality code.

Not only is the code technically superior, but the users are also strongly committed to the application. Since their input to the requirements and design has been courted throughout the project, their sense of ownership is much higher than in a typical, non-Agile, project.

At the end of this and every iteration, code is of production quality, ready to be deployed into production if and when you choose.

Further Iterations

In our experience, except for the very largest projects, a further two to three iterations is sufficient to complete an Agile application development project.

Each additional iteration is marked by further requirements gathering, detailed design, coding and testing culminating in a new user-accepted application release and (where previous releases have been implemented) a tested migration plan with back-out contingency.

About DB Consulting

DB Consulting is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with extensive experience of ASP.NET, C#, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, BizTalk Server, InfoPath, Office, SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services. But we also work with XML, SOAP, Oracle and BusinessObjects. We have a strong capability in the development of mobile applications, with deep skills in .NET Remoting and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.

For more information on our application development services, please speak to Nick Hill on 01753 626625 or by email at nhill@dbgroup.co.uk