Software Development Process
Agile Project Management
We use a simplified version of Agile project management, which is a value-driven approach that allows software development teams to deliver high-priority, high-quality work to their stakeholders. It’s nothing like the plodding, costly and error-prone approach to waterfall project management, which has delivered inconsistent results for years.
Our 6 Stage Process
1. Initiation
To start the project off, your PWS Project Manager will establish the project in our Project Management Portal, ensure that you have access and establish the necessary local development and staging environments. During the initiation stage, we will also discuss with you the main objectives of the project, your business requirements, objectives and priorities and guide you through the project management system we use. You have access top the project management system for the entire duration of the project, allowing you to monitor the progress of your project at any stage.
2. Requirements
Once you are all set-up with our project management portal, we start working with you to define some higher level requirements for your highest priority items. These are usually referred to as User Stories (because you tell us what you want in your own words, i.e. I need to have three membership levels) or Features (I want the system to be able to do this). Throughout this process you use terms you understand, leave the technical jargon to us! Anytime throughout the project you think of something new, simply enter it in the project management system and our live notifications will ensure that we don’t miss anything you add.
3. Analysis
Once we start receiving your requirements for your project in your words, we translate your requirements into a set of instructions for the development team in terms they completely understand we call tasks. Our development team then goes to work estimating the effort required to complete these tasks. Once the amount of effort is clearly understood, we discuss with you the priorities for the first iteration of development and provide you a fixed price quotation. Because of our Agile methodology, each iteration can be as small, or large as you desire, you set the budget and you set the urgency. You have full visibility of this entire process through the project management portal.
4. Design
This is probably the most fun part for you. In this stage we develop the user interfaces and work out the look and feel of your application. We create mock-ups of how the system will look on various devices and you even get to draw your own ideas if you want to. We also use this stage to develop all of the architectural layers of the system, but let’s not get bogged down in technical speak. By the end of this stage you will know what your system will look like including menus, buttons, text boxes, various pages and overall look and feel.
5. Development
This is the exciting part for us! We now get to build exactly what you want. You will able to watch our progress in the project management portal and best of all, if you see things that you want to change, it is no problem. That is one of the biggest advantages of the Agile methodology – It embraces change during projects. As your project is being developed, you can also be adding more requirements for the overall system or any changes that you want made to tasks already underway.
6 Testing and Acceptance
OK… So the system is build, it looks how you want it to, now we just need to test it and make sure that there are no surprises! We conduct functional testing of each task prior to loading into our staging environment where you will be able to conduct your own testing. You test it and make sure it works exactly as expected and then once you accept the task, we load into the live production area for you. Don’t worry though, if you notice anything wrong at any stage, just let us know in the project management portal and we will take it from there.
I can’t believe it was actually possible! Fantastic effort and much quicker than we expected.
Enquire About Software Development for Your Perth Business Today!