Velocity West provides a comprehensive range of services from site design to back-end systems integration, enabling you to meet all your objectives from a single source. In a dynamic market, it is important to work with a company that has a proven development framework. The rewards are reduced time-to-market and efficient project delivery, critical elements in the successful completion of any Internet project.
Discovery
We work closely with your domain experts to ensure that we apply our engineering expertise in the most effective way. We start our projects by gathering and defining your business and functional requirements to ensure that we have a deep-rooted understanding of the details of your business needs. Our product managers are tasked with ensuring that we understand your vision of the product, and with ensuring that you understand the implications of the technical challenges and tradeoffs. The main deliverables for this phase are a Product Vision document, and a preliminary Risk assessment document. This phase ends only when you sign off on the Product Vision document.
Architecture and Technical Exploration
Next we focus on architecture and technical design exploration. We will explain to you all of the potential approaches to meeting your solution. We will explain the risks involved with each approach, and will clarify their probability and impact to your comfort level to assist you in your decision if you want. We will work with you on clarifying your priorities for features if you want. The deliverable for this phase will be the Master Project Plan, Master Project Schedule, and the Master Risk Document. There will also be a preliminary Test Plan document. No coding has yet begun, and it will not until you, the customer, sign off on these documents. We reduce our client's development costs by our thorough planning phase. It's much cheaper to make changes in functionality during technical exploration than it is to make changes in the middle of coding. We will be absolutely firm with our Master Project Schedule, if you want, fixing cost, schedule, and features to an absolute. Alternatively, we can be flexible to changing requirements, and still provide a guarantee on one of the following of your choosing: cost, schedule (deadline), or features.
Development and Testing
As we move into the development and testing phase, we continue to apply engineering risk management and deliver continual status reports to our clients. This is often overlooked, but it is very important, because molehills in the road can become mountains as you proceed, and avoiding them, or going through them, often involves product decisions best left to the customer. In this phase, we shift focus to pure heads down coding based on the requirements and technical roadmap that we have developed through earlier work. The deliverables for this phase are the software product, and the Master Test Plan document. This phase continues until all known issues in your product have been addressed, and it has passed your acceptance testing.
Deployment
We will work with your company to ensure that your operations division understands how to deploy and support your application. This is not something left to chance or taken for granted. This is something we plan for to minimize your total cost of ownership.
Performance and Scalability
Our software engineers conduct architecture reviews, load testing and stress analysis, to improve the performance, scalability, and architecture of our clients' software.
Application Integration
Companies must leverage current investments in back-office systems and connect seamlessly with business partners to stay competitive. Our combined understanding of operating systems, database systems, networks, and software development gives us the know-how to understand your whole enterprise architecture.
User Interface Design
Product features mean little without usability. Information technology only works if users can quickly learn it, understand it, and get the information they need when they need it. Our user-centered interface and information design practice ensures that our technical solutions meet the business needs of the people who work with it. We will work with your users to understand their requirements, and to ensure that they are provided with an adequate level of user documentation for the product, and the tasks that they are intended to perform with it. We will also work to enhance the discoverability of your product features in the design of their presentation.