Projects

Introduction

Our extensive project methodology experience combined with development mastery provides the perfect foundation on which to execute a successful production process. Our production hub in Cape Town, South Africa serves as a valuable resource for our clients abroad who wish to leverage off the advantages of international outsourcing.

Our process and methdology

According to the Standish Group Report 2009 68% of software development projects fail.

A major cause of this failure rate has been exposed through research to be the process or methodology followed by most software development teams – often referred to as “traditional” or “waterfall” methods.

The failure rate of software projects has remained fairly consistent for a number of years – in fact it has slightly worsened over time according to the Standish Group. This reality motivated a group of concerned software professionals to meet together in February of 2001 and compile what is now known as the “Agile Manifesto” of which White Wall Web is a signatory.

We believe (and have seen) that software projects run in an “Agile” way yield far better business results. Working in an Agile way requires discipline and collaboration and is fairly difficult for those who are new to the methodologies as some of them mean working in a way that may seem counter-intuitive at the outset.

The most marked immediate differences between Agile methodologies and Traditional/Waterfall methods are:

• Working in far smaller “chunks” or iterations at a time, with retrospectives after each including the stakeholders of the software (end users or representatives)
• Each iteration delivers working software which may or may not get deployed to a live/production environment
• Have far more discussions during the development process and being open to (even encouraging) change
• Putting the responsibility for project success on the entire team rather than on individuals

About SCRUM

There are a number of Agile methodologies that have been developed around the principles contained in the Agile Manifesto. Currently the methodology favoured and used by White Wall Web is called SCRUM.

We favour SCRUM as we feel that it presents the best balance between simplicity of implementation, sensible disciplines and proven results. We have now been running SCRUM projects for over a year and have seen great results.

    “You guys have accomplished in 2 months what we did in 2 years with better results!”

About Sprint Zero

Sprint Zero is a paid consulting phase where we work with you to answer some crucial questions that will need to be finalized regardless of which vendor you choose to do the development:

• What is our clients business? What are we trying to solve and what are the high level requirements?
• What functional and non-functional features are absolutely fundamental and which are optional/nice to have?
• In what order should the requirements be delivered (all things considered)?
• Are there existing systems that can do some or all of what I need and if so, what will it take to get them to fully work in my business? Or should I build from scratch?
• Will this system need to integrate with other systems and what are the integration options? What is the quality of the various integration interfaces offered by these other systems?
• Will I need import historical data into this new system? If so, how much data? What is the quality/cleanliness of the data? >What is the cheapest/most effective way of getting the data into the new system and clean/error free?
• What technologies should I use based on my existing licenses and the costs vs. benefits of the various technology options available to me?
• What infrastructure will I need for the production environment once this project is complete? What will be required to support, maintain, enhance and scale the product? What will my usage base be and thus the load on the infrastructure?
• What data security features will be required and how will those requirements be met?
• What design principles should be followed: Navigation/usability design, database design and visual design?

Sprint Zero is an intensive consultation phase involving a multi-disciplined team and headed up by a Business/Systems Analyst. For most projects, Sprint Zero takes one or two weeks.

Large or complex projects may require a longer Sprint Zero. We will quote a fixed price and time frame upfront for Sprint Zero based on a short consultation we will do prior to quoting.