Our way of work
Project Agreements
At Swapps we work with Agile Methodologies. This means we have an Agile philosophy way of working. This philosophy is focused on delivering value (real working software) every iteration (every week or two weeks depending on the project).
This Agile Philosophy has three fundamentals:
- It is impossible to gather all the requirements at the beginning of the project.
- Whatever requirements you do gather are guaranteed to change.
- There will always be more to do than time and money will allow.
We have borne out these fundamentals in our 10-year experience with software projects.
With this in mind, projects with a fixed total budget are not as feasible as a project with a monthly budget. By having a monthly budget, we can adjust the team’s velocity and deliver great value according to it. You define the budget, we work accordingly.
Agile Principles:
These are the principles we will guide or project on:
- Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
- Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
- Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Responsibilities on both parts to achieve the Agile principles:
Swapps’ responsibilities:
- Make sure the iteration user stories are done within the time and budget constraints.
- Make sure the code is ready to launch by the end of every iteration.
- Quality code and continuous testing and delivery.
- Attend any changing requirement within an iteration, have availability to discuss and fully understand it.
- Have coding and process flexibility to make the changes needed when needed.
- Guarantee a self-organized team.
- Guarantee development and project management retrospectives.
- Being available to join video calls to clarify requirements.
Client’s responsibilities:
- Attend weekly meetings where the current iteration is reviewed and the next iteration is planned and defined.
- Set iteration’s priorities that covers but not surpasses development availability and budget.
- Answer questions and test promptly within the iteration.
- Be aware that the changes in requirements can change the budget and what can be achieved in the iteration.
- Communicate promptly and in a very detailed manner the changes in requirements.
- Have availability to discuss the changes.
- Being available to join video calls to clarify requirements.
If any responsibilities are not met on any of both parts, the success of the project will be weakened.
We are 100% committed to these responsibilities, are you? If not, maybe it is not the proper moment for this project. If yes, please continue.
How is the process of working with Swapps?
- Inception Deck
We don’t jump to execute. We want to understand your whole vision and objectives to be all moving to the right place. For this, we will ask you to do the inception deck which gives you a broad spectrum of the project. In the inception deck we will solve the following:
- Why are we here?
- Elevator pitch
- Product box
- NOT list
- Meet the neighbors
- Show the solution
- Tough questions
- Size it up
- What’s going to give (trade-off sliders of scope, time, budget and quality)
- What’s it going to take (We will give you a rough budget and timeline).
- User-story workshop
Once we get to an agreement, we will meet to get the main user stories of your project. This will create our user-story backlog which you will prioritize taking into account to deliver the most valuable features first.
- Define sprints
With prioritization, we can plan the tasks that will be done per sprint.
- Deliver sprints
In a weekly or biweekly meeting we will demo the sprint features for your approval and will plan the next sprint.
- Quality assurance
For us, it is vital to assure quality on your project, that is why, each time a task is finished, it is carefully tested and will not be approved until it is completely right. Also, developers constantly make tests on their code guaranteeing the accomplishment of all the requirements, assuring the quality required.
- Fast delivery of functional results and making improvements
For Swapps, it is very important working hand in hand with the client, so, you will be involved throughout the process and will be able to see functional advances of the project periodically each time an iteration gets to an end. Then, the improvements detected internally at Swapps and the ones detected by you are applied, taking the product to the quality required.
- Final delivery
Finally, you will have the desired product, with the quality required and in the expected time.
Communication
Our available communication channels are slack, email and zoom video-calls. Direct calls, whatsapp or other messaging apps are not in our communication stack. Still, we guarantee extra-fast response in our selected communication channels.
Sounds good? Let’s work together!