With a focus on speed of development, our Accelerated Software Development approach makes us an ideal software development partner. We work at pace, developing powerful business applications using either .NET or Java technologies. Our accelerated approach handles change naturally; iterative delivery, incorporating a 2-4 week software release cycle, allows requirements to be changed or reprioritized as the project progresses, and users are able to exercise a high degree of control over the functionality that is delivered in each release.
We start each project with a scoping exercise, typically lasting only a few days, without any charge or obligation to continue afterwards. The output from this activity is a project brief containing a description of the project, a summary of what initially is in scope, a prioritized list of key functionality required, 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 the project initiation document as you see fit. It is obviously our hope that you will decide to continue with the project. If you wish to continue, we assign the project team and work starts on requirements gathering, design, coding and testing of the first iteration. The scope of this iteration is set with the consent of your key business users. For the majority of projects, it is the case that the first iteration – a fully tested, working, subset of key functionality – can be delivered in four weeks elapsed.
We understand that ‘agile’ may in some cases be a difficult proposition for customers to accept, as it sometimes appears that the customer is taking all of the commercial risk. We also recognise that some customers will naturally be apprehensive when engaging with a new partner on a software development project. We are confident our approach works, and to back this up we commit to undertake the first iteration of every new Agile project at very low cost: typically, we aim to deliver the first iteration at a cost of less than £5,000. For each subsequent iteration, if required, we will agree a fixed price for the delivery of agreed functionality. We believe that this offers customers an extremely low-risk way forward to realize the benefits of developing applications using an agile approach.