Startup Services
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Development
As a startup, it’s important for you to ensure that you are able to take an early version of your solution to your customers in order to get early feedback from your customers and to begin the process of engaging them. In order to achieve this, you would need either a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or sometimes just a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to be built. We specialize in working with startups such as yours in understanding your requirements and quickly build such an early solution/prototype for you, while still adhering to an architecture that allows you to continue building on top of what’s built early.
User Experience (UX) Design
User-experience plays a significant role in determining adoption of an application by users which, in turn, determines the success of the application. We have extensive user-experience design expertise gained by first designing our own product, PebbleTalk, and later with several products/applications that we built for our customers. We see the user-experience-design phase as a fundamental part of our application development process. This determines how the user would see or perceive the application as well as something that allows both you and the development team to be on the same page as to what’s being developed. Once the user-experience is finalized, we work on the visual design elements and come up with non-functional navigable HTML/CSS pages that allows you to use it to make early demos to your customers/users to seek their feedback.
Product/ Application Development
We have prior experience with developing our own product and vast experience with working with several startups in successfully building their products. We begin by first discussing with you your idea and your planned timeline for your initial go-live. Based on this, we scope the initial launch based on our first-things-first approach so that we pick only the top-priority features for the initial launch. The idea is to manage the scope actively to avoid the usual pitfall of picking too many features for the initial launch. This saves your startup both time and money.
Once we begin, we first deliver you the UX design and visual-UI design for the application. The UX and the visual UI design helps you visualize the solution and also use it to get early feedback from your stakeholders.
We also help you in the cloud-deployment architecture and move the software to production on the cloud for your go-live. Post go-live, we help in the ongoing support of the application.
Our Approach to Project Execution
1. Requirements Discussions
We work closely with you during this phase and spend time with you to understand what you are intending to develop. Subsequently, we perform a diligent analysis of the software requirements. This helps bring clarity on the unstated and subtle requirements as well as identify potential conflicts or contradictions within the requirements. We also identify any ambiguous or missing requirements at this stage. We believe this is the most important phase of the software development cycle.
2. Scoping based on first-things-first approach
Once we complete exploring the requirements, we next move to scoping the work. In this phase, we take a critical look at each requirement and label them as those that are necessary for the current release of the application and those that could be moved to a future release. This is a very important exercise that prevents feature-bloat in a given release and also ensures cost optimization and also enables an early go-live.
3. Milestone Schedule
Once the project scope for the current release has been identified, we divide the project requirements into multiple milestones with each milestone having a meaningfully-related set of requirements. We publish the milestone schedule at the start of the project. What this means is that right at the start of the project you know exactly when to expect which requirement. This gives you adequate time to prepare for testing the milestone releases as well as plan early demos for your customers or end-users.
4. UX/UI Design
In this stage, we provide you with UX/UI design for the application that’s based on the contemporary design standards. The UX/UI design of an application is a very important part of the application development process. Visualising the application much before it is actually developed plays a very important role in giving you an idea of what the application will look like and how it will work. This helps you validate it against the requirements you have had in your mind. It also provides you with an excellent opportunity to put it in front of your customer or end-user to seek their early feedback.
5. Software Architecture and Design
Our team has vast experience in software architecture and software design. We avoid over-engineering. We strongly believe that simple and elegant software architecture and design delivers manifold cost benefits to you over the long-term both in terms of future enhancements as well as ongoing maintenance of the software. The architecture needs to be robust, secure and scalable.
6. Software Development
Our architects design the software that enables our developers to adhere to the design philosophy while they innovate in their code to meet the feature requirements. Our developers are enthusiastic about coding and they love to deliver well written code to you.
7. Software Quality Assurance (QA)
Our QA team ensures that the product features work according to the requirements so that we can save time by avoiding rework and go-live as planned. The quality assurance team is skilled in both automated testing as well as manual testing.
8. Customer Testing in Sandbox
We deliver each milestone release onto a sandbox environment on the cloud. This enables you to test the milestone release. You could also use it to demo the application to your end-users or customers.
9. Production Deployment and Go-Live
Once the final milestone is complete and deployed on the sandbox, you can test the entire application in the sandbox environment. We help you with creating a strategy for the production deployment of your solution. While you are testing the final application in the sandbox, we use the time to plan for the production deployment, migrate any data onto production, and keep the production setup ready on the cloud. Once you are satisfied with the sandbox testing, we deploy the application onto the production environment. Once the application is deployed in the production environment, we also set up the initial set of data relevant to production. At this time, your customers or end-users can begin using the application.
10. Ongoing Support
Once the application goes live, we support you with any help your customers or end-users need. If there are any unexpected issues that crop-up, we work promptly to address such issues.
Post go-live, we discuss with you the next set of feature enhancements that need to be incorporated into the application. At this time we follow the process as we did earlier. We first begin with requirements analysis. We then move to scoping and milestone identification before moving to design and development. And finally, go-live of the new features.