Application Development at Ibuildings

At Ibuildings we have a very clearly defined methodology for new development projects, which has been proven successful over many major jobs. A key element is that we require your direct involvement, because we believe strongly in working closely with customers throughout the whole process. The result is a perfect match between the final application and your wishes.

Before beginning development, we work with you to identify all your requirements and needs, and your relative priorities. We then translate these into functional and technical designs - the blueprints of the new application.

When developing new applications, we take an 'Agile Development' approach. Time and budget are fixed, with the deadline and the ultimate cost being our two key drivers. We do not follow a methodology based on desired functionality, because we believe this can cause unnecessary delays. Functionality often changes after the start of a project. Our approach requires that any changes are immediately compared against the original functional and technical designs, to get a clear insight into how the changes affect the original plans. This method forces both the designer and the customer to focus on mission-critical requirements, without getting sidetracked by new circumstances. The key advantage is that you can count on a project being completed on time, within budget and being of the intended quality.

Ibuildings uses an iterative development process. This means we develop the application in steps, and after each step we deliver a finished sub-application that we evaluate with you. In this way, new insights and priorities can be incorporated into the project during the subsequent development stage. Secondly, it is often difficult to know in advance precisely what the application will look like. Thanks to this step-by-step approach, we also benefit from a much clearer idea of how the application will look well before the end of the project, allowing us to implement design changes in time. Finally, our development approach is highly collaborative. During the process, you effectively become part of the development team. We believe the more we can work together during the development process, the better the final product will match your wishes.

The Ibuildings development process is also very much test-driven. Before starting to build functionality, we first write the test procedure that we wish to perform. As soon as the functionality is ready, the test is automatically run.

When the project is finished, you will receive a clear set of documentation detailing exactly what Ibuildings has delivered. During the development process, we adjust both the functional and technical designs as soon as any changes occur. In this way, documentation on the application architecture is always up-to-date, allowing us to implement new changes and enhancements easily.

Development teams

At Ibuildings, we divide our experts into independent development teams. Each team works on multiple projects and always includes:

• A project manager
• A software architect
• An analyst
• Software engineers. All of our developers are Zend Certified Engineers (PHP 5) and on average have over three years of PHP experience
• A graphics specialist

Alongside the development teams, we also maintain a Professional Services Team. This team consists of PHP leaders: software architects, system administrators, consultants and highly experienced software engineers.