Software Development

Elizabeth City, NC, North Carolina, Application Programming Interface

Software Development

You demand reliable, consistent, repeatable software development practices. Productive Technology delivers software development services you can understand, track, measure, and repeat. Our predictable software development methodology results in highly maintainable, professionally written applications.

Professional Development Practices

Any sizeable software system will benefit when developers consistently adhere to software development best practices. Your consultant can advise your team or manage a remote team on these best practices, including:

• Selecting meaningful naming conventions for programming variables, procedures, and files
• Utilizing common procedure calls rather than cut-and-paste repetitive coding
• Appropriately using object-oriented design principles
• Descriptive and sufficient commenting throughout the code
• Properly using frameworks, object models, templates, and application blocks

Using Source Code Control

Any team with two or more developers benefits from source code control. Even a project with a single-developer should have code archived to a source code control repository. A consultant can guide your team in the proper use of tools and techniques for source code management.

These tools provide powerful capabilities to learn who made changes, when changes were made, and why changes were necessary. Proper use of source code control enables your team to recover prior versions of the source code, or view the state of the development effort at some point in the past. This capability is invaluable in reconstructing past events in the course of a software development project.

Managing Change

Change is common in custom-written or custom-modified software. Changing business conditions, regulatory environments, and technological advances can all result in changes to software systems. Often, changes occur during the system's initial development. Change is so common, it is expected and should be anticipated. An experienced consultant can help manage this change by:

• Designing the system to accommodate many types of possible changes that may be anticipated
• Implementing a change-control procedure to bring all aspects of the change to designated staff for approval

Particularly in cases where a project has a fixed budget, a consultant can carefully assess the proposed change, offer alternatives, and evaluate the impact of each alternative in terms of application capabilities per the requirements, development costs, and delivery timelines.

Staffing the Right Resources

Whether you plan to manage the software development in-house, or you are considering outsourcing the work, staffing resources are a key concern. After all, the quality of these resources will directly affect the finished quality your software system. To locate and properly screen candidates, IT managers may turn to a staffing company.

An experienced consultant can help you deal with staffing companies. A consultant can assist you with some important considerations, including:

• Researching and evaluating the staffing company's reputation
• Negotiating fees in your best interests
• Ensuring you know the spread between the staffing company's bill rate to you and the wage the developer is paid; this is crucial to good relations with the developer
• Providing you with unbiased information on each staffing company's capabilities
• Evaluating service levels provided by each staffing company

Select a consultant who has sufficient experience dealing with staffing companies. Productive Technology's consultant has a staffing background, and is highly prepared to assist you with all aspects of dealing with the staffing industry.

Managing Software Developers

Individual technical contributors can be tricky to manage. Software developer personalities can cover a wide spectrum. Teams frequently consist of a diverse cross-section of ethnic cultures. Particularly when managing distributed or remote software developers, effective communications are vital. Productive Technology's consultant has the communications ability, project management skills, and staff leadership capabilities to assist your team.

Matching Development with Requirements

Every software development effort is unique in some ways, and alike in others. Large-scale development, using multiple developers, demands more coordination and management resources than a single-person effort. A whole host of management issues arrive when outsourcing software development to lower-cost coders.

Your experienced consultant can personally develop software, and can manage a larger-scale project involving multiple developers. IT staff is well-served to seek the advice of an experienced consultant when establishing a software development team, particularly if that team is distributed over remote locations.