Our Process

Our Philosophy

At Robinsage we believe that our clients should understand and be comfortable with all phases of development. Over the years we have developed a stable process for development and project management that we believe is mutually beneficial for our clients and our development teams. We have applied our philosophy to great success with our corporate clients.

Our highest priority is to ensure you, as a product stakeholder, have a viable functioning product and an awesome development experience. We strive to ensure that our relationship with you is positive so that we can be continued partners and assist on all your software development needs.

Getting Started

When a company begins down the road of planning a software product they often make the assumption that the cost, the timeframe, and the feature set must each be fixed. Trying to fix project cost, timeframes, and feature requirements rarely results in a functional product that can be delivered on schedule. Usually one, two, or even all three objectives will be missed in spite of everyone’s best effort.

We believe that no project can be fully understood, documented, and planned from conception. There are simply too many variables. There are too many cases where an unforeseen issue or product requirement can completely alter even the best planned projects. If the entire project is fixed from the outset, any single problem or change could be enough to cause the project to be delayed and over-budget. Change orders, contract alterations, development extensions and the associated delays that keep your product from the market are frustrating to deal with. Such situations also rarely result in a positive relationship between client and software vendor.

To ensure that your product contains all necessary features AND is delivered on-time AND within budget we have found it’s best to do the following:

• Decide on a target timeframe to have your product ready for release. Whether the timeframe is six months or two years you will have an excellent means to manage expectations within your company. Having a set timeline will also allow you to coordinate with your marketing department, support staff, and other related departments in parallel to the development of the product. Everyone can work toward the same target. Our highest development priority is to ensure that you have a functioning viable product at the end of this timeframe.
• Forget the notion that you must have every feature in your initial design document included in the product release. Such considerations are often counter-productive and may cause opportunities for innovation to be missed. We have discovered that product stakeholders need to have the freedom to observe their software in action before making decisions about which features will make the final cut. Often, using early builds of the software can help all involved realize better solutions to accomplishing product requirements which could not be envisioned abstractly.
• Prioritize your product specifications and features. Many times, this is a more difficult task than you would expect. In the beginning, every feature can seem to be absolutely vital to the success of the product. Rate each feature for how well it will contribute to the overall viability of your product. During the course of development you will likely come to the conclusion that this prioritization needs to be altered. Some features that had seemed imperative at the start may have actually been unnecessary to accomplish the projected goals.
• Plan your budget based on your timeframe. We allocate devoted developer resources to your project. The shorter your timeframe and the more features you need in that timeframe, the more developer time that we must devote to your project. Your budget covers the labor to build your software within the agreed upon timeframe. Because your feature set is not fixed, you are paying for the work required to attain a viable product. You will always get a viable product on time because our development process is flexible and transparent enough to ensure that all software goals are attained even as they change.

What to expect when we take on your project

We firmly believe that in order to have a successful product that the development staff and you, the project stakeholder, must be in sync at all stages. After all the contracts are signed and we are ready to begin, we like to meet with you and your team to discuss the project on a high level. We review your product specifications and priorities. We listen and understand the who, how and why of each product requirement. From this we write detailed design specifications, technical specifications and build plans that will help guide all parties through the development process.

We strive to have a functioning product for you to review at predefined intervals throughout the development timeframe. After you have had a chance to review the progress of the software, we meet and discuss any needed adjustments to the feature priority list. We then continue development and iteratively improve upon the product all the way up to its release.

After your product is released you may have need for continued development, server or database management, and software improvements. It is our objective that your experience is always satisfactory and that we may be your software development vendor of choice now and in the future.