Software Development Methodology - Yorkshire Developers

We have experience of many different development methodologies however we have found that RUP in particular allows us to deliver excellent software maximising quality and working comfortably within your budget. We like to deliver excellent working software at frequent intervals. We do this for two reasons:

  1. We believe that working software should be the primary measure of progress
  2. We understand and welcome that business requirements often change resulting in software requirement change. By delivering software in units allows maximum adaptability to change.

These are principles of the agile manifesto. Because we prioritise our software development around these beliefs we have found that a combination of Scrum and FDD allow us to deliver software which truly satisfies our customers' requirements.

Software Development Lifecycle (RUP)

We like to use a cut-down version of IBM's Rational Unified Process for development. This consists of four short phases:

  1. Inception - requirements understanding, cost and schedule estimates & priority planning.
  2. Elaboration - UML system modelling, risk analysis and development plan.
  3. Construction - Unit Development of key deliverables
  4. Transition - Documentation and deployment

Unit Development Lifecycle (Scrum)

To deliver working software as the primary measure of progress we like to use a variation of the Scrum methodology for software development. Scrum is the primary methodology used by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

We first break your requirements down into a series of key features which are then prioritised into key deliverables with an aim of providing regular deployments. We also usually base our remuneration upon these key deliverables giving you peace of mind that no escalation in costs will occur.

Once we've broken down, agreed on and designed key deliverables we then develop each of these using an iterative development cycle:

  1. Develop Feature
  2. Deploy
  3. User
  4. Quality Assurance Feedback
  5. Feedback Incorporation

We continue this cycle until the software meets the joint acceptance testing document which is also agreed during system design.