Estimate Project

OUR APPROACH
TO PRODUCT DESIGN

Creating a product today is like cooking gourmet food - the only difference is our products are “tasted” by a large number of people.

Here’s how we do it.

Ingredients

30% effective
methodology
25% solid
process
20% proven
instruments
25% a pinch
of creativity

Organizing the Process

These are the core processes that take place within each of our company’s projects:

Img process diagram Flag Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7 Step 8

What are we going to do?

Things to discuss on the first call:

  • Purpose of the project and the client’s business needs
  • High-level scope and limitations
  • Acting stakeholders
  • Target audience

It is important for us to understand you better!

NOTE: Probably you don't have all this information - so we will help you find it and define. This information helps us to understand your needs deeper.

Outcome: This step helps us identify the individual on the client’s side who will act as a liaison with us and work with us to curate the project. We also need to become familiar with the idea behind the product.

Moving deeper - prepare proposal(list of stories, estimates, budget)

In this step, we define a list of user specifications and come up with a rough time and cost estimate for completion. Based on this, we calculate the budget, define milestones and prepare a commercial proposal.

Here we create a description of main milestones.

Outcome: Commercial Proposal:

  • High-Level Specifications / Product Backlog
  • Proposed team structure
  • Hourly rate for each team member
  • Total budget range (min/max)

Prototyping & Design

To make your product more attractive we split design work in 2 phases:

  • User Experience (UX)
  • User Interface (UI)

We want to save you time… and us, too! Planning the User Experience (UX) in the first phases of the project is a must. We prepare prototypes of the various pages as well as data flow diagrams. Once these have been approved, graphic design projects can be completed much more quickly.

Outcome: We save you time and money.

Software Development

We believe in an iterative approach to software development.

Here is the flow:

  • Determine and improve product specifications from the initial product proposal
  • Re-estimate milestones to ensure the utmost accuracy in project delivery
  • Assign tasks based on priorities and team workload
  • Coding and comprehensive testing of the application
  • Get the team and product owner to sign off
  • Product release and demonstration

NOTE: Web and Mobile application development can be done simultaneously.

Outcome: The client sees a working demo of the application which incorporates the new features after each iteration.

Risk management

Every risk can cost time and money. We are very careful to avoid them as much as possible.

Risks types:

  • Human error
  • Technological
  • Contextual (project specific)
  • eLack of information

High level risks are identified in advance to be considered before initiating project development. Low level risks that appear during the development phase are logged and estimates are made to address them. Various alternatives are then presented to the Client.

Outcome: A risk that is defined early in the development process will lead to reduced development time in the future.

Quality Assurance

We perform manual and automated testing to ensure the product works as expected.

  • Automated tests cover from 30% to 70% of functionality depending on the stage and complexity of the project. These tests are performed automatically after each build of a new product version (several times per day).
  • Manual testing is performed with the addition of each new feature and fortnightly during the regression cycle.
  • A solid series of tests helps ensure good product documentation which can be used by any other party involved with the project.

In both cases we are managing solid test suit that can also play a role of documentation for software.

Outcome: Your product works as expected

The Production Server should be Efficient and Scalable.

We work with the following vendors:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Linode
  • Rackspace
  • Digital Ocean

We have experience in setting up applications to work with 20+ servers running in parallel.
We Ensure Data Redundancy
With scaling
With frequent backups
Through the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
By implementing an auto-recovery process
With a smoothly automated deployment process

Outcome: 99,99% uptime

We provide ongoing support and maintenance of your application.

You are not left alone to fend for yourself once the project is complete. We are always ready to help with:

  • Minor updates to the product
  • Server maintenance
  • The next major upgrade of your product

Proven instruments

Here is a set of processes, which are transparent to our Clients, but which enable our teams to work as efficiently as possible:

GeraERP
CI Airbrake
Jira Ruby GitHub

and lots more! see extended list of technologies

Gera ERP – An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system we built ourselves.
Gera ERP helps to:

  • Eliminate human error
  • Automate interaction with the Client (under human control)
  • Improve transparency of the team’s work

by providing space where we can managing employees, teams, projects, customers, invoicing, accounting, salaries, time tracking and reporting, and so on.

Logo geraerp

CI - Continuous Integration Server as a way to avoid human error when building new versions of an application.

Logo ci

The leading exception reporting service, it currently provides error tracking for 50,000 applications and supports 18 programming languages.

Logo airbrake

Jira - The world’s best collaboration tool for software development teams.

Jira logo

Ruby on Rails® - An open-source web framework optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity.

Logo ruby

GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million repositories. Large or small, every repository comes with the same powerful tools. These tools are open to the community for public projects and secure for private projects.

Logo github

And the last but the most important - People

Img cake

People are at the heart of the process. The right people who do right things when placed in the right positions.

They bring creativity, performance and the human factor to the project -which is always good.

Outcome: Get the project done! Get it done better than expected!