Our Philosophy

We wanted to build good software that can endure the inevitable changes.  We offer an innovative new way of delivering software development and support services built upon a long term relationship between the development team and the client.  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 the services needed to provide a 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 fixed fee quote for work (no matter how large or small) so you know what you are going to get and what it will cost.

Measurement is an important part of knowing how well we are doing. We were very cognisant of the fact that whatever we chose to measure will be optimized by the development team, for better or worse.  The performance measure we settled on is business functionality added or changed per dollar, over the lifetime of the software.  The 'added or changed' is a key term, as most of the work in software development is adding or changing existing software.  By taking this into account we include in our measure how easy the software is to maintain. 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.

Our model addresses the following two fundamental problems with the traditional business models for delivering application development and maintenance services.

1. Consultants and contractors don't necessarily 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 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

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.