Our goal
Our business is building mobile applications that are perfectly aligned with your business needs and processes, and work exactly in the way you want. We don’t want to clutter your screen with unwanted and unnecessary features, particularly when what you want is a business tool, not a child’s toy. We don’t want to bleed your performance with needless animation; what we want to do is spend our time providing you with the functionality that allows you to achieve your goals quickly and efficiently.
Discovery
At Calandra, we concentrate on providing you with a quality application that supports your business. We achieve this using the agile methodology, which puts the client at the centre of the development process. The first step is the discovery process; here we aim to thoroughly understand your business and your specific requirements. We do this collaboratively, by listening to your staff, by observing your staff at work, and by reviewing your existing process. We’ll summarise our understanding in a requirements document, which we can then use to explore with the client the best way forward. We can then move on to the specification stage.
Specifcation
At the specification stage, we take the agreed high-level requirements from the discovery stage, and create a formal functional specification. This will include a mock-up or visual wireframes, which will demonstrate the system’s ‘look and feel’. We understand that it can be difficult to envisage an application from a document, even is augmented with wireframes. For this reason, we always develop a working prototype; this enables the client to better understand how the application will work, and its ‘look and feel’, and to ensure that ours and the client’s thinking is aligned. We can now move on to development.
Development
During the development stage, the client may think that it’s time for them to sit back and relax, while we do the work. No such luck! We use the agile methodology, and aim to release working code at minimum once a week, but preferably more frequently than that. The regular releases of working code gives the client an opportunity to comment on progress, to decide on priorities, and to suggest amendments or enhancements that are revealed by the development process. We recognise that the development process itself often uncovers opportunities or problems that were not apparent during the discovery and specification stage. It’s quite possible for the client to request changes at this stage, but our development process allows for this, and indeed welcomes it.
Testing
‘Test early, test often’ is our motto. We do have a specific test phase of development process, but in fact testing is on-going throughout all stages of the process, from discovery to delivery. Our goal is to deliver robust and reliable software, and the nitty-gritty of how our Quality Assurance team achieves this by using a combination of automated testing and self-validation that is built-in to the software, peer-reviews, and external novice testers.