Analysis & Planning

During this phase we review all initial requirements and assign a product manager to shape out the vision of the future application in a vision document.

  1. Usually our product manager performs certain research in the field of customer’s business to make sure that the vision correctly states business goals of the customer and the future application is likely to help the customer to achieve those goals.
  2. After that, in a series of discussions with some prototyping we produce a high-level application specification. It usually contains the main user stories, application structure and most required features.
  3. Having that, project manager assigns the team members, introduces the project to them and together they prepare a development plan with milestones and iterations.

We recommend spending several days together in your or our office, as this phase is crucial to setting up an effective and comfortable collaboration process and minimizing any potential risks.

Phase result:

  • — application specification (product backlog);
  • — assigned team members;
  • — development plan with milestones and iterations.

Design

We always start with design/UI first following the Getting Real methodology.

  1. Mockups/preliminary designs are prepared first.
  2. At the end of each milestone, the draft application is carefully reviewed and discussed with both parties to make sure that it conforms to the original vision of the product. If necessary (and it usually is), the vision document gets updated based on the evaluation of interim application releases.
  3. The development plan and specifications are updated accordingly.

Phase result:

  • — updated specification and implementation plan;
  • — final designs for the core part of the application (secondary designs continue to be created and the phase is overlapping with front-end and back-end development).

Development

  1. Iterations are planned given prioritized backlog activities.
  2. Adjustments/recommendations to product vision and approvals from our clients are incorporated into plans and processes.
  3. QA/testing – some of our applications are run under heavy load and solutions should be extremely effective. We practice both TDDand BDD approaches, and believe in expedience of continuous integration.
  4. Together with development iterations there are QA iterations. Usually development ones are about one week ahead of QA ones.

Phase result:

  • — iteratively accepted product features and components;
  • — iteratively adjusted specifications and shifts in vision;
  • — required coverage with tests and/or constant regression testing;
  • — complete product ready to production deploy.

Deployment & Support

  1. In some cases we practice proceeding with SLA on projects. Scope varying from 24/7 to ad hoc analysis, support, extensions to the product. Application life & load monitoring, backups, tools for maintenance – all this is used on demand.
  2. We provide constant background analytics to product life and further development and share recommendations of our mastered R&D consultants.

Phase result:

  • — product deployed to production and tested.