Empower your business with self-organizing teams, built around A-PLAYERS.

As agile practitioners, we don’t stick to one framework. While SCRUM is the most popular, we embrace other approaches, like Kanban and Lean Management, usually adding DevOps practices into the mix. We ensure smooth operations while you maintain 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

We know that ideation is not a one-time step, but rather an ongoing, continuous discovery process. We’re equipped with experience and tools that enable us to ensure consistent product innovation.

Practices:

Lean Startup, Event Storming, Design Sprint, Game Storming, Lightning Decision Jam

Our UX/UI Lab has a proven track record of designing practical, easy-to-use solutions, perfecting methods that achieve an efficient and effective design process. Research --> Workshops-->UX Design--> UI Design --> User Testing

Practices and tools:

Idea Generation, Lightning Decision Jam, Game Storming, Design Sprint, Design Thinking, Wireframing, User Testing, Competitive Audit, Customer Journey Maps, Design Systems, RoadMap, MVP Mural, Axure, InVision, Figma, Sketch, Lookback, Storyboard, Zeplin, Principle, Illustrator

Nowadays, releasing new products (or features) on 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 – that’s why our development team does not expect comprehensive system documentation and uses a couple of handy tools that help them gather the information they need, saving you time and resources.

Practices:

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

Being agile means reacting to change, and observing change, which requires data. In a rapidly evolving business world, you need to notice the right trends at the right time, while not drowning in vast amounts of data. The same goes for software development. Monitoring progress in a smart way improves the development process and quickly enhances 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

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 write Selenium UI tests. Most of our products have thousands of automated tests that are constantly run by our continuous integration environments which usually cover over 80% of the system code base. This eliminates the need to involve costly testing teams for excessive manual testing.

Practices and tools:

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

Keeping high source code quality standards is our pride and joy. Besides making us happy, it also has some minor side-effects like: greatly improving product quality (less bugs), increasing flexibility (easier to implement new features) and speeding up delivery time. “We like our spaghetti on the plate, not in the code.” – Software Mind 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)

In software development everything looks good on paper (or in PowerPoint). Everybody promises the world, but not everybody can deliver. Our teams work in short, 1–2-week production cycles. With a mature, continuous deployment process in place, it’s not uncommon to release new features a couple of times a week. This allows our clients to verify their business ideas and constantly check if the product meets their expectations. Our MVP/PoC approach is another technique that helps us swiftly deliver business value. This way we can quickly (usually within weeks) release the first version of a product in order to confirm its alignment with users’ requirements and market trends.

Cybersecurity is the number one concern for today’s CTOs. Given recent, well-publicized big break-ins and data leaks, it’s no surprise. However, keeping your infrastructure secure with just an InfoSec team is not enough. Security should be the responsibility of everyone in an organization, including software developers. We understand this – that’s why we treat it as part of the overall system quality and strive to educate them in security measures. 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

After months of hard work your team is finally releasing the latest version of your product. Everyone holds their breath and keeps their fingers crossed. Features that the business team have been waiting for so long will finally be available …. if everything goes well. It shouldn’t 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 and tools:

Continuous integration, Continuous deployment, Feature Toggles, Canary Releases, DevOps mindset Octopus deploy, Puppet, Docker, Rancher, Kubernetes, Bamboo CI, TeamCity, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible

We understand all too well that the right communication is 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 considerable effort into finding the most optimal communication channel (e-mail, message board, reporting tool, chat, teleconference, face-to-face meeting, …) for the tasks at hand. Our experienced project managers are laser-focused on managing information flows, and technical staff members are trained in technical and soft/communication skills.

Tools:

Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Slack, Basecamp, Jira, Trello, Webex