Our Agile Process

We will create an application for you, that reflects the essence of the service you want to provide to your customers*. With your help, we will collect your needs. We will present you an initial web design or analyze the one you already have, allowing you to expose your unique value to your customers.

We use an agile process in which you are a vital piece bringing your continuous feedback. We deliver you increased value, visibility and adaptability earlier in the project.

At the heart of our process is continuous feedback both ways. To make easier your review of changes anytime, anywhere, we use a set of web tools and automated deploy scripts so you can see any changes as soon as we have them. This will happen, usually, every day. This is the way we give you feedback.

When you review these changes, you will have new ideas and new changes that you will post back to us. This last part is how you give us feedback and how the application evolves. Together, we build a balance to prioritize the business value of your system.

Our process is different from what you could have experience before. From the first release, you will have access to working software that will allow you to visualize the project focus, progress and your ideas implemented. Our QA and Graphic design teams work closely with our development team, testing all the features so you can feel the continuous advance of the project. This allows us to deliver business value in every step for you.

We continuously plan our releases prioritizing with you, considering the most valuable features that you want to show in your application. Because of this, we easily adapt to changing requirements throughout the process: we embrace change.

Our process uses some similar practices as Scrum: an iterative, incremental, time-boxed agile methodology for project management.

Project Structure

As a first step we meet with the stakeholders (customers) and with the Product Owner (PO), that represents the customers' interests. Together we define user stories that describe the application in general. Granular tasks (also called work items) are derived from user stories. Along with the PO we prioritize those tasks and put them in a backlog that could be defined as a prioritized list of tasks. The scope of the Project can be changed. Planned but unimplemented features can be replaced with other stories of the same size in any release.

We plan a time boxed release (named Sprint) and define what user stories (features) are going to be released for that Sprint as showed in the next graphic.

The Product Owner is responsible for communicating the vision of the product to the development team. He or she must also represent the customer's interests through requirements and prioritization. Stakeholders and PO must be responsible for both making decisions and providing information in a timely manner. Because the Product Owner has the most authority, it's also the role with the most responsibility.

The PO has to:

• Articulate the product vision to the team.
• Contribute defining the goals at the beginning of every sprint.
• Tell the story behind each user story so that the development team understands what is required. So the PO must understand the end user requirements.
• Define or help define the user story acceptance criteria so the team knows when they are done.
• Be able to prioritize the stories and be able to negotiate/collaborate on priorities with the team. Negotiate priorities occurs when after taking the top priorities off the backlog; there may be some remaining capacity that the next highest priority story won't fit in to. So in those cases, a lower priority feature could be picked.
• Must agree not to change his instructions before the end of the Sprint.
• Must be available at all inspect and adapt points to answer questions and help guide the team in real cases.

As showed in our process diagram, at the end of the Sprint, once we have worked with our Graphic design and QA teams, the application will be accessible to you throughout a web site, so you can review the features that have been implemented and give us your feedback.