Project management

How we do the analysis

We listen attentively to our client to understand what is important for them, what is crucial, and what is secondary. Understanding the goals, we can offer different solutions in terms of functionality and price.

How we conduct an R&D survey

t is not always clear what is the optimal solution to the problem. There are some problems that are not clear at all how to solve and those require the research phase to determine:

• Is it even feasible in this form? If so, what are the options and how much do they cost?
• If not feasible, what are the alternatives to achieve the project goals and how much do those alternatives cost?

Usually, this is done before the start of a complex technology project to eliminate risks.

How we plan a project

There are different projects and they demand completely different approaches:

1. If it is a small-scale project with its boundaries clearly defined and no changes in the requirements are expected, we can create a project schedule and calculate the development cost. Then we plan the project sprints, staff, identify the project risks and plan the service activities.
2. For many projects at the start phase, the project goal is not yet clearly defined. We have only a general direction and need to apply an iterative approach: make a step, try the current version, and revise the plan.
   Usually, this is how all new products are developed: they are revised during the development process as a result of receiving feedback from the market and potential audience.
   For such products, we set high-level objectives and deadlines for accomplishing them. Then we plan iterations and tasks within those iterations. Accomplishing any of such objectives can be considered a mini-project.

How we manage the project

Usually, we use one of the agile methodologies, which we adapt to the specifics of working with a particular client. Almost always the process of working on a project is divided into iterations (sprints), each iteration lasts 2-3 weeks.
The client and the team set objectives for each iteration and plan a certain set of tasks. The results of the iteration are delivered to the client as a pre-release version of the product the client can work with.
This approach allows the client to be in constant contact with the team, track progress, and correct the result towards the direction they need.

How our QA works

Our QA-engineers create checklists, which are the lists of all the cases to be checked.

The testing may be manual or automated. The choice of the approach depends on the price and the following parameters:

• The need to run integration tests every time a product is built
• An extremely high cost of errors caused by human factor (for example, for financial systems)
• Some other specific conditions

There are some special types of tests, when we test the product on different software and hardware configurations, under different types of load, run different scenarios of work by a certain number of simultaneous users.

With a certain level of security requirements, we perform automated penetration testing for every new release.

Technical support

Usually, we solve non-critical issues that arise in the systems we create within 1-2 days. In case of a critical problem, we can react immediately, for example, in case of a service failure that affects a large number of users.

However, for such services, we usually set up systems for monitoring various environment parameters and automatic recovery in case of failure.