Our Engagement Life Cycle

Our Envision phase is focused on understanding the opportunity from the perspective of the various stakeholders and target audiences and then critically examining, validating and extending these initial ideas into a workable and actionable solution.

The dual objectives of this phase are to:

• Generate and evaluate innovative solutions to support the vision, and
• Rapidly converge on the high payoff opportunities to define the application roadmap

We use a combination of stakeholder interviews, workshop sessions and walkthroughs to storyboard the key scenarios. This serves to gain clarity, validate the business premise and facilitate consensus around the overall solution, in terms of defining what should be built and the high level technical approach to take. This is followed by prioritization exercise that factors in the business priorities, technical risk and organizational readiness to define the scope for each phase which forms the basis for the solution roadmap.

Click here for additional information on the prioritization process.

While this process is geared towards achieving the primary objectives, stated above, the most valuable outcome of this phase is the refinement, articulation and visualization of the high level concepts and ideas that serves as the actionable shared vision for the rest of the engagement.

The prototype is the visualization of the business concepts that were developed in the Envision-Scope phase. The prototype phase has two main objectives:

• Determine the overall user experience based on the key user interactions and use cases
• Implement proof-of-concept scenarios for any new technology components to investigate the unknowns and mitigate technology risks

This phase plays an instrumental role in clarifying and articulating the vision. Often the prototype serves as the primary means to raise venture capital or secure executive approval and funding for the subsequent phases of the project.

The design activity actually kicks off in the background in the Prototype phase and is completed before the implementations of the key components begin. This consists of the designing the data model, the connectivity and messaging architecture, selection of open-source and other third-party components to be leveraged and the overall integration architecture of the various components that will combine to provide the needed application functionality.

The build phase leverages the work that was initially conducted in the prototype phase making the necessary modification required for industrial strength implementation. We utilize a modified Agile approach to manage the build phase.

Scope is fixed for the release, but we use Agile practices to manage delivery. The Build phase is divided into several short sprint cycles that help measure progress. Regular checkpoints are scheduled to demonstrate features implemented, review results and get feedback. Despite a fixed scope, our process if flexible in that scope can be swapped if business priorities shift. Enhancement request are tracked, prioritized and factored into the planning for the subsequent sprint cycles.

Testing is an integral part of the development process and is baked into the sprint cycle. It starts with unit module testing, followed by continuous integration testing, as soon as modules are integrated. This is undertaken from the customer perspective focused on the requirements and functionality. We also test the system based on the knowledge of the internal workings of the application (white-box testing). We believe in testing early and continuously with the integration of each significant module, paying close attention to cross browser issues. When necessary we conduct usability testing early in the process to ensure that that application conforms to the user experience design and is intuitive to use.

Once a critical mass of the system is ready we focus on the non-functional tests such as performance testing, load testing, failover testing and security testing, relying on automated tools to assist in the process.

We expect our clients to be actively involved in the testing process, not just for user acceptance testing. This stems from our belief that issues identified earlier in the process are easier to address. The test process culminates with user acceptance testing and simulated runs in the production environment to test the deployment environment.

We undertake the complete deployment for our startup clients. In case of enterprise clients we adhere to the defined standards for deployment and handoff. Typically this is followed by a knowledge transfer and empowerment effort.