The traditional web-agency model has been to have a few experienced people in key roles, then fleets of junior staff working in cookie-cutter fashion, shielded from the client by 'process'.
PreviousNext consciously flips this approach on its head. We have a hiring policy that means our team averages 10 years' professional experience, and we recognise that each project will have its own unique requirements that a factory-style process won't accommodate. We also recognise that our clients need to be closely embedded with the team to understand the complexities of development and to prioritise where their budget is being spent.
As a result, our approach is based on a pragmatic and highly collaborative implementation of the Agile Development Methodology, to which Drupal development is perfectly suited. Agile is utilised by the world's leading technology companies and web startups to manage large-scale projects, the main benefits being:
Collaboration & communication
Agile promotes a higher level of knowledge transfer between team members and clients. We utilise a suite of web-based tools to collaborate and manage all types of project communication and deliverables, meaning we can easily manage distributed development teams and clients in disparate locations.
Transparency
We ensure our client contact (the 'Project Owner') is embedded as part of the development team, promoting transparency and better understanding of processes and deliverables.
Iterative development
We break up large projects into iterative release cycles where small groups of features and functions are built and released to a development server in a completed state for client acceptance testing.
Prioritisation
Agile is focused on prioritisation of feature and functional requirements. This means that projects can go live with core functionality in a faster time frame, with less urgent features added over time in subsequent iterative releases where the budget and timeline allow.
Responsiveness
Requirements changes will always occur mid-stream on large projects, and Agile enables the development team to respond quickly to these changes by re-prioritising features for release.
Iterative testing
Testing is integrated into each iterative release, resulting in a shorter period of final testing at the end of the project cycle.
