A few years ago everyone at Quixa decided that we would only do successful projects, as neither we nor our customers got any satisfaction from working on unsuccessful projects.
We have found that there is ONE factor that guarantees a successful project. Success only happens when people work together in partnership. We have a unique approach to development, which you have to be happy with, otherwise success won't happen.
We are an agile development company.
This means that in development we value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is undoubtedly value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. This is the Agile Manifesto.
However, this does NOT mean anarchic and unstructured development.
All of Quixa's principals are PRINCE2 practitioners, and all projects are planned and managed; we use a combination of PRINCE2 and extreme programming (XP) iterative disciplines. We have strong configuration management, and are working towards BS ISO/IEC 27001:2005.
We do:
- Goal-centred design (we trained with Cooper).
- User stories and iteration plans.
- Draw pictures of processes and interactions and discuss them with you.
- Visual and paper prototyping, user testing.
- Test driven development.
- Share responsibility for, and talk about, progress.
- Pick the right people with the right expertise to work on the your project.
- Make mistakes (we're reassuringly human).
- Generally deliver working software on time and within the expected budget.
We don't:
- Design the system in isolation and provide a specification to the smallest detail and then sign a "fixed-price" contract to deliver it.
- Ever write UML.
- Write big waterfall project plans and then look surprised when things go awry.
- See changes as form filling exercises and profit opportunities.
- Leave testing until the end.
- Have a ‘pool' of ‘identical developers' who can seemingly be slotted into your project at will.
- Blame.
- Develop "enterprise" applications.
If you like the sound of this, then we'd love to meet you. If you want to find out more about Quixa and BPM then why not consider the mix of skills needed for BPM development.
