Our Philosophy

At DJiNN we believe that the traditional business models for application development and support suffer from two fundamental problems:

1. Consultants and contractors don't have a vested interest in the long term success and maintainability of the software.  If the consulting company charges an hourly rate it is in its interest to continue charging those hours.  If the company charges a flat fee it is in its interest to deliver the software as cheaply as possible, sacrificing functionality and maintainability where possible.
2. Software development has become such a specialized body of knowledge that it can only be approached by a dedicated and disciplined team trained for the task and knowledgeable about your business and the requirements of your application.  It is challenging for most business to hire and maintain such a team in-house.

DJiNN was founded by three software developers frustrated by these problems.  We wanted to build good software that can endure the inevitable changes, but the business models do not support it.  It's not useful to build good software if you go out of business doing it.

It was clear to us that a different business model was needed.  We immediately realized that a long term relationship between the development team and the client must be core to that business model.  However it took us some time to work out a model that would reward us for that.  It was also difficult to find a measure of how well we where doing.  We were very cognisant of the fact that whatever you measure will be optimized by the development team, for better of worse.  The measure we settled on is business functionality added or changed per dollar.  The 'added or changed' is a key term, as most of the work in software development is adding or changing existing software.  The measure of 'business functionality' was very difficult, but by combining ideas from function point analysis, development methodologies, and cognitive theory we developed a new way for thinking about and measuring software.

The result was an innovative new way of delivering software development / support services.  Each development team strives to be an efficient in-house development team that is time shared over a small number of clients, and shares knowledge and tools with other teams to make delivery of business functionality more efficient.  In parallel we developed all of the services needed to provide a clear and clean separation of responsibilities between us and our clients.  These responsibilities have two guiding principles

1. You decide what the software needs to do, we get that accomplished
2. We provide a guaranteed fixed fee quote for work (no matter how large or small) so you now what you are going to get and what it will cost.

Our model solves both of the problems listed above.  By measuring our performance the way we do and by providing an exciting work environment to retain development teams we have finally developed a business model that rewards us for building software we can be proud of.