Faqs

How does our Agile Process work?

We prefer to use an Agile development process whenever possible. The Agile process is flexible, efficient, and involves a lot of collaboration with the client.

Clients are involved in the process every step of the way to insure that the application is meeting their needs. In traditional software development methods, you don’t view the completed software until the very end of the process. With Agile, you’ll be able to use the site as early as two weeks into the development process, which allows you to give us early feedback and verify that we’re building the right solution for your needs.

We often work in small collaborative teams to take advantage of the breadth of knowledge, experience and ideas from our different developers.

Agile is Flexible. Agile development makes it easy to incorporate changes to a project midstream if the client's requirements or ideas move in a different direction. This flexibility is a key benefit and prevents the common and unpleasant “that’s not in the specs” discussion.

We use automated testing to help ensure that the software that we write works as intended, not just when it’s first written. Having a library of automated tests allows us to make changes freely without having to worry about breaking things elsewhere in the software. The tests will tell us if anything needs attention after a change.

Our process is completely transparent. You can view the project and give input throughout the development process, not just at the beginning and the end.

Our Agile process looks like this:

1. We work together with you to identify a set of User Roles, which are the different types of people who will be using the site.
2. We’ll work together to create a list of User Stories, which are brief descriptions of things that users can do in the site.
3. We will give each User Story an estimate, as a number of Story Points. Story Points are the currency of Agile, and correspond roughly to one hour of work.
4. You’ll prioritize the User Stories, based on the value they add to the project and the amount of time we’ve estimated them to take. You’ll identify what order you’d like to see them completed in, and categorize them according to MoSCoW, which is our abbreviation for Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have.
5. We’ll estimate how many Story Points of work we can complete in a two week Iteration and select as many of the highest-priority User Stories as we can fit into an Iteration.
6. We’ll implement the selected User Stories. This will often involve having discussions with you to make any decisions about interface or functionality.
7. At the end of two weeks, the selected User Stories will be 100% complete and tested. You’ll be able to use the site and verify that it works correctly.

We’ll repeat steps 4-7 as many times as necessary. You can re-prioritize User Stories or add new ones at any time.

We find that our Agile process consistently results in successful web and mobile software that meets or exceeds the needs of our clients.