Our teams will feel like part of your organization

We are agile practitioners but we’re not sticking to one framework. While SCRUM is the most popular one, we do not shy away from other approaches like Kanban and Lean Management. And usually we like to add DevOps practices to the mix. Everything is done so that work progresses smoothly and you have control over your product and the process.

Practices: Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Kanban, Lean Management, DDD (Domain Driven Design), DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing , Continuous Deployment

Move faster … but not blindly

Nowadays, releasing new products (or features) to the market is more important than ever. There is no time for long periods of system design and business requirement analysis. On the other hand, moving forward without sufficient documentation results in a lot of re-working which negatively impacts Time to Market. We understand this very well; that’s why our development team does not expect comprehensive system documentation and can use a couple of hefty tools to gather information that they need.

Practices: Agile workshop, User Stories, INVEST, Personas, Product Backlog Refinement Meeting, Sprint Planning, User Scenarios with early UX testing, Acceptance Criteria as Tests, BDD

Always know where you are

Being agile means to reacting to change. To observe the change often you need data. In fast changing business world, you need to observe the right trends at the same time avoiding drowning in excessive data. The same goes for software development. Monitor progress in smart way to improve development process and quickly enhance your product.

Popular metrics we use: lead time, cumulative flow chart, team velocity vs capacity, sprint and product burnup charts, technical health of the project, team focus factor, business value tracking.

Deploy faster and with more confidence … but without an army of manual testers

Quality is built into our development process. Our developers start creating automated tests even before writing actual functionalities (TDD). They also create automated user acceptance tests by following Behavior Driven Development principles and writing Selenium UI tests. Most of our products have thousands of automated tests that are constantly run by our continuous integration environments and usually cover over 80% of the system code base. Thanks to this there is no need to involve big testing teams for excessive manual testing.

Practice: Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, Continuous Integration
Tools: JUnit, Karma, NUnit, Moq, Mockito, Cucumber, Spock, NSpec, SpeckFlow, Selenium WebDriver, Watir, TestLink, SQLT, SoapUI, Postman, JMeter, New Relic, LoadUI

Great products are built on a solid foundation

We take pride and joy in keeping high source code quality standards. Besides making us happy it also has some minor side-effects like: greatly improved product quality (less bugs), more flexibility (ease of implementing new features) and ability to deliver things fast. “We like our spaghetti on the plate not in the code.“ – from SoftwareMind development team ☺

In our development bible you will find the following practices: SOLID, YAGNI, DRY, Design Patterns, Code Review per every task, Static Code Analysis, DDD (CQS/CQRS)

Don’t ask about development progress … see it for yourself

In software development everything looks good on paper (or in PowerPoint). Everybody promises the world. But not everybody can deliver. Our teams are working in short 1-2 week production cycles. With a mature continuous deployment process in place, it’s not that uncommon to release new features a couple of times a week. It allows our customers to verify their business ideas and constantly check if the product meets their expectations. We also have experience in building Minimum Viable Products (MVP) with time to market below 3 months.

Security is a responsibility shared by everyone in an organization … not only by the InfoSec team

Cybersecurity becomes a number one concern on CTOs short lists. With recent big break-ins and data leaks, it’s really not a surprise. However, to keep your infrastructure secured having an InfoSec team is not enough. Security should be the responsibility of everyone in an organization … including the software developers. We understand it, that’s why we treat it as part of the overall system quality and put a lot of effort in to proper education in that area. We also started experimenting with concepts like Continuous Security and Security Build Into the Process.

Tools: Owasp ZAP, Sonar Qube, Fortify, KubeSec, BDD-Security, Nessus

Software releases should be adjusted to your business plans not the other way around

After months of hard work your team is finally releasing the new version of your product. Everyone holds their breath and is keeping their fingers crossed. Features that the business team have been waiting for so long will finally be available ….  If everything goes well. It really doesn’t need to be that way. With properly implemented automated deployment, features can be released even a couple times a week and deployment goes from being a nerve-racking experience to business as usual.

Practices: Continuous integration, Continuous deployment, Feature Toggles, Canary Releases, DevOps mindset

Tools: Octopus deploy, Puppet, Docker, Rancher,  Kubernetes, Bamboo CI, TeamCity, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible

One misunderstanding is often worth a dozen bugs

We understand all too well that the right communication is the key to building successful products… yet this often proves very difficult to achieve. With a development team working remotely and not available to the project stakeholder on site, this becomes even more challenging. That’s why we’ve put a lot of effort into finding the most optimal communication channel (e-mail, message board, reporting tool, chat, teleconference, face 2 face meeting, …) for the tasks at hand. Our Project Managers are experienced and heavily focused on managing information flow, and technical staff members are trained in technical as well as soft/communication skills.
Tools:
Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Slack, Basecamp, Jira, Trello, Webex