The difference between an enterprise that runs and the one that crawls is simple — apps that work, and quickly so.
Table of Contents
2. What Staqo Ensures With Agile?
3. Our Process Breakdown — The Staqo Methodology
Why Fast Apps Matter?
It’s a running joke in Staqo’s teams that the projects that come to us – arrive as babies but start running like Olympic athletes even before they get out of the cradle. The secret lies in the no-nonsense, extremely rigorous, and lightning-fast approach we adopt towards every application project.
Staqo’s DNA lies in the tenets of core team-user alignment, utmost clarity, transparency, modular development, swift stage-by-stage execution and continuous improvement. The result is spot-on, sturdy and responsive apps that are on your table much earlier than you would expect. And without compromising expectations, without risking time-creeps and without indulging in project-spill-overs.
From Sprint to Sprint — Agile makes us leap.
It is an approach that boils down to a competitive advantage for our clients. After all, the difference between
an enterprise that runs and the one that crawls is simple apps that work, and quickly so. We create apps that deliver performance without a lot of time spent waiting for them.
This helps our clients to attain customer-centricity, user intimacy, real context, actual relevance and a workable
solution.
What Staqo Ensures With Agile?
Our fundamental philosophy percolates every team and every function in the development scenario. Every person is well-versed in some salient underpinnings of our development approach.
- Be on the same page with the client and with each other.
- Start Running from Day One
- No room for confusion, bugs, poor quality or performance hiccups.
- Check well for even the smallest crack of failure with continuous reviews,
feedback loops and rigorous audits.
Besides that, we strongly believe the days where we needed to cook all dishes before putting them on the table in a seven-course meal, are long gone. It’s an era of presenting every course one by one – so that a user’s taste, comfort, feedback, nuances, expectations, functionality-level, maturity and experiential factors are suitably and timely integrated in the next course to follow.
At Staqo, our emphasis in on this agile approach of app development. We make apps that are always fluid, apps that are constantly evolving for the user, and apps that hit the ground running.
Leave the Waterfall. Pick the Fountain.
The idea behind this approach is to:
- Avoid long gestation period of app development with iterative, incremental and continuous development
- Pre-empt any conflicts between a user’s actual needs and what an app ultimately turns into
- Inject quality and testing into every stage deeply in the process
- Cut down on ‘translation loss’ between users and developers. Also remove technical debt
- Deploy latest frameworks like CI, CD, Containers, DevOps, AIOps, SecOps etc. in the development cycle
- Shorten the distance between UI-UX sampling and real functionality delivery
- Avoid frustration and wastage arising through long lead times, sloppy code, hidden bugs, poor QA, cancelled projects, etc.
- Strengthen developers and testers with a good grip on what is ultimately expected from the apps
- Eliminate inefficiencies, delays, misunderstandings, chaos, islands, friction and bugs from the overall cycle
- Kill vapourware. Create software that works – from day 1
- Create made-to-measure apps that are always fresh, responsive, ready for the real world – apps that fit the user completely
- Convert technical agility into business agility
Why Agile Development Is The Right Way?
- 86% of organisations use agile development for software development.
- Agile adoption within software dev teams, jumped from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021
- Some 64% indicate that adoption of Agile accelerates software delivery and 47% note that it enhances team productivity.
- About 42% feel that Agile approach improves software quality and 41% say it strengthens delivery predictability, while 40% feel it makes project visibility better
- 39% opine Agile brings down project risk, 24% feel it bolsters team discipline, 23% note it reduces project costs and 20% reckon it heightens software maintainability.
Our Process Breakdown — The Staqo Methodology
There is no secret sauce to how Staqo can create apps which are lightning-fast but also light-weight, in every project. It’s all about fundamental factors that define our projects and equip them for fast and high-level outcomes:
Set the foundation right, and everything will fall into its place.
Step 1: Kick-off With Clarity
When a project arrives at our desk, Staqo’s project leaders start the process by clearly outlining the overall scope and impact areas of the application. This is a process which involves the key stakeholders from Staqo’s side, from the end user’s side and from the client management’s side. It brings them all to one core backbone – defining the functional and non-functional pillars well in advance.
Assumptions are termites — don’t let them eat your application from inside.
Step 2: Documentation & Flow
That’s the Master Key for successful, and time-sharp, projects. Our teams lay down all the requirements, features, functionalities, deliverables, schedules, and expectations in a well-mapped document. This further strengthens clarity between what the user ultimately wants and what we would deliver. It’s an important exercise for validation of requirements.
A raw, but, basic MVP with all must-have functionalities is better than a botched-up LaLa Land.
Step 3: Design & Conceptual Preview
Once the project is defined well, our developers, designers and quality experts get into action. Armed well with our building blocks and modular templates, they start the engines from day one and start developing initial modules like Admin flow, Home Page, Log-In set-up, Basic Layout, Main Menu and Navigation. This allows the client to get a taste of what the application would look and feel like in real world. Any corrections, feedback, suggestions, etc. can be incorporated in a timely, and seamless, way by the teams at Staqo.
The core aim is that the customer should get an immersive, and almost-complete, feel of the application-to-be. Plus, there should be no silos among developers, designers, testers, users and project leaders. Every brain working on this application should be on the same para, while being on the same page.
Check the tires before you switch on the engine. And, put the user in the driver’s seat.
Step 4: UAT Milestone 1-to-n
Each key aspect of the application is divided, and categorised, into a specific functionality – from front-end to back-end constituents, interfaces and modules. From here on, the teams deliver respective functionalities in parallel formats to the client with well-formed User Acceptance Testing pieces. All the necessary project architecture, configurations, maps and components have been built well at Staqo to accelerate this process. The teams hit the ground, running easily with various parts of the application. And as they do that, they take continuous feedback and assimilating various changes – on-the-fly.
This is where we check several angles from a practical lens:
- Dependencies
- Adjacencies
- Bottle-necks and Show-stoppers, if any
- Third party experience and feedback
- Risk assessment
We tinker every angle to check where, if at all, the functionalities-in-progress can fail. This leads to a thorough, objective, and ruthless external party evaluation as well.
Our UAT frameworks use a scenario-based approach. They accommodate ample space for not just the client, but its customers and users to test-drive the app in their own ways.
For instance, an e-commerce application can have various UAT scenarios – like shopping cart, payment gateway, customer support, personalisation algorithm and so on. All these UAT pieces can be tested in various milestones- for compatibility, quality, integration, regression, performance and other testing criteria.
And finally, with an end-to-end audit, the team makes sure that the application functionalities and parts are checked for security, quality, UI, random issues and actionable elements.
The wearer best knows where the shoe pinches — no shoe-horning with our apps!
Step 5: Final UAT & Completion
Based on these audit-based changes, testing and quality aspects – the teams keep shaping the application into a final version – ready for deployment. As the application gets into gear to this last mile; it has evolved, changed, been sharpened and got oriented well to the actual user needs and nuances – thanks to the incremental and parallel model adopted so far. By this time, based on user acceptance feedback and tests, it has ticked all the requisite boxes without wasting an extra day or buck. It’s the Go-Live moment!
To capture what we do in development vernacular, we release software fast – we don’t wait for production, we create a working software. We roll out the code as it pops up and get rapid feedback. This helps us to capture insights, mistakes and gaps collaboratively with the client. Staqo does all this with fluid and collaborative teams across all stakeholders, all departments from coders to testers and all the way to the users – through weekly scrums. This helps us to reduce dependencies, but makes room for cross-pollination. We also deeply embrace new models like Shift-Right practices, Value Stream Management, Kanban boards, Automation, and Continuous Monitoring.
Conclusion
When one delivers working software, it’s the software that works.
Today, organisations have to respond to market needs faster than ever. They have to be nimble enough to change their products as they strive to satisfy their customers and stakeholders without downtime. So, understandably, they cannot afford to be trapped in boxes and layover time. Using an agile model enables users to get some of the business benefits of the new software quickly- before the competition does so. In doing so, it also arms the IT team to get rapid feedback on the software’s scope and direction, and get it closer to elevating a user’s outcomes. This is important to reckon because even the mostarticulate users may fail to fully express what features they want, and it’s only when they actually get a functionality in hand that they can decide if it nails their expectations. That makes a continuous water loop much better than a frozen waterfall approach. At Staqo, the applications are not built like a relay-race. We prefer an extremely fast and goal-oriented football. We keep the ball moving. And we get you the goal. With Staqo, you can experience this new world of fastfooted and future forward apps. It’s a world without waiting rooms. It’s a world of fast runways. Get on it. Today.
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