Our agile process tailored to your needs
At Maxcode, we aim to build a customer-centric environment where our employees are responsible for the success of their projects. Our dedicated teams are client-focused and their approach leverages Scrum to ensure client satisfaction. The well-known benefits of using Scrum are simple: Quick results, predictable duration, flexible and transparent work from the start.
First of all, our main challenge is to sync and understand what our customers are in need of. Be it developing a new platform, adding features to an already built one, or modifying existing functionalities to fit business needs, we aim to be there, understand the issue at hand and work together for achieving the desired result.
Our experience shows that regular meetings are only to accelerate knowledge and business understanding and are particularly useful to get everyone up-to-speed with what is to be built.
Whether it is face-to-face or online, these interactions are paramount to create a well-focused team and to maximize the return of investment in the long run.
We do that by spending time with our customers to understand the domain, researching possible solutions, applying already acquired know-how, and creating one-of-a-kind deliverables that are tailored to your customer’s needs.
Requirement gathering is a phase we are very comfortable with, and it’s one that particularly puts our creativity at work to find that particular solution that our customers are looking for.
We always learn and we adapt our acquired knowledge as best as it’s technologically possible while maintaining our in-house quality standard.
We approach projects in one of two ways, depending on the size and complexity.
Long term projects – of what can be characterized as big platforms, large scale applications, cloud solutions, are best suited with a stable team, over a long period of time, with well thought out processes that are created together with our customer.
Project-based approach – or small projects – are characterized by customers that want to try out an idea, create an MVP, and quickly launch it to the market. Time is key, so we need to achieve a maximum return of investment. The whole exercise is to start small, deliver fast, and adjust to what the market says.
Once we have a way-of-working defined, we create teams to assist our customers.
We can create an independent team that works on the assignment with business knowledge received from our customers. This works really well with companies that are completely outsourcing IT requirements to us, or when companies have a well-established IT division and we are pitching in to help.
Mix-teams work great under cooperation scenarios where both companies learn from one another. Culture, technology, processes, and way-of-working are combined to and create a special recipe that brings everyone to work more focused on the task at hand thus enabling both companies to increase their knowledge, expertise, and reach.
With having a way of working defined and a team assigned to the task at hand, our focus now is to deliver on what has been committed. Teams are trained to deliver working pieces of software that can be installed, or attached, and used immediately to serve our customer’s needs.
Deliverables are to be expected within 2 weeks’ time and the project can easily shift focus depending on market needs. Predictability is achieved after a couple of weeks, thus allowing a more accurate project planning for releases. Shortcuts can be made to achieve fast delivery; we are well-trained to discuss with our customers and explain the choices of development and expectation of the future.
We are focused on delivering reliable, stable, and quality-driven software.
We do this by paying close attention to the testing processes, following the clean code guidelines, using continuous delivery and continuous integration as well as constantly improving our way of working.
We have defined an internal quality standard that covers the development process, and we regularly monitor and adapt it so that we deliver to our promises.
Be it large, or small, we always stand by our customer even if the project development phase is over, by offering maintenance and support for our deliverables. This ensures a healthy and reliable collaboration that benefits all parties.
We are smart, savvy engineers that want to take on the challenge so that you receive a worry-free experience on delivering your next product.
The trend nowadays is to release a version of the application fast and perform ongoing updates throughout the development phase and beyond, also known as ‘Continuous Development’. It seems to be the driving force behind management’s decision to work in an agile way.
At Maxcode, we believe the process referred to as the Minimum Viable Product (source: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries) can be combined perfectly with Scrum. An experienced Product Owner uses his skills to collect as much information as possible from stakeholders and prioritizes it by means of a Product Backlog, but the most honest and maybe valuable type of feedback is the feedback coming from the end-user. The product may not be final, it pays to test ahead of time in order to assess as soon as possible what works and what doesn’t.
Used correctly, the framework guarantees that the functionality adding the most value for your product is built first.
The MVP is not that version of the product of which you are convinced that it contains all or exclusively the functionality you think it should have. The quintessential is to collect that information from real users as soon as possible, before you invest (or waste) too much.
The MVP is better described as a repetitive strategic process consisting of generating the idea, creating a prototype, collecting (user) feedback, analyse and learn. The end goal is to build a good product that users want to buy and use.
Each phase holds clearly-defined results:
We encourage you to release your application in a early stage to figure out your customers’ needs and expectations. Throughout the measuring and learning phases of the development of your product, you continuously refine your next version of the MVP and update your Product Backlog. Following these steps, we are ready to continue with the next release.