Development Process

At Signature we work with our clients to deliver solutions to their businesses needs, with high degrees of accuracy and at the earliest possible stage. We achieve this through:

• Seeking the truth - in terms of requirement evaluation, appropriateness of design, best fit with the business, and ease of long-term support
• Reduce Risk - by delivering solutions in a granular and incremental manner that ensures that we evolve the solution in close alignment with expectations
• Maintain Loyalty - through becoming part of the client's virtual organisation and by integrating the client into our development team we build trust and loyalty
• Reduce Costs & Investment Overheads - by identifying exactly what will deliver the maximum benefit for the minimum cost we achieve the optimal cost/benefit delivery

Here at Signature, we achieve these client benefits by working in smaller teams using Agile Test Driven Development techniques. Agile helps us to work in partnership with customers to digest the project plan and then distil it out into meaningful Stories, which in turn, are divided into two-week 'Iterations Deliveries'.

Tests are done first, before the project iteration begins, so that quality assurance begins at the very start of the development. This reduces critical inaccuracies and bugs to zero as the customer is consistently testing with us as we deliver functionality to a staging area every day. At the end of the two-week iterations, a handful of stories will have been completed and it is at this point that the resultant code is released to User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for further client testing. As more and more iterations are completed and tested, the accumulated momentum builds and whole development process becomes a 'sprint'.

This overall compound momentum is a win-win situation for the client and for Signature as accurate, tested code and procedures turn into Product and Services that are delivered in the shortest time possible and without compromising quality. 

So we would define Agility as a set of development attributes that:

• reduce deployment and migration risks by introducing the clients system in small, accurately defined and tested steps
• speed up development by allowing the client to provide constant feedback on features and functionality as development proceeds

provide a better return on investment and better visibility of the project by delivering key business benefits as soon as possible and certainly not waiting for the completion of the whole system!