Our Approach

We Manage Development To Ensure the Successful Release of Your Software

Blueberry's extensive skills and experience have been crucial to the success of many businesses! We use a collaborative customer project tracking system to managing the software development process, and also offer accelerated application delivery using our own BBWT framework for building secure, bespoke web and cloud applications to best practice standards.

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How We Work With You

Tendering for the Contract

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1. Initial Meeting

We discuss your software development requirements in detail. Ideally, we prefer to meet face-to-face, but we often do this over the phone.

2. Proposal

We produce a proposal based on the initial conversation. The proposal includes our thoughts on the best way to meet your requirements – often we provide an analysis of two or three options, and then make a recommendation on the best approach. We aim to make our proposals fixed-price, but this depends on how clear your requirements are.

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When Blueberry is Selected for the Contract

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3. Detailed Design

For most software development projects, there is usually more design work to clarify exactly how the system should work. For larger projects we prefer to do this work face-to-face; for smaller projects we can work via phone and email.

4. Update Financials & Agree Contract

If the requirements have changed during the detailed design process, we will update the project costs. We work with the customer to achieve the best balance between cost and system functionality. We agree terms for the project. Normally we ask customers to pay in stages, with each payment due against some development milestone.

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5. Development

Our team starts work on your software system. Our project manager keeps you updated on progress on a bi-weekly basis. We believe strongly in involving the customer throughout the project – we use a collaborative customer project tracking system, called the PTS Customer Portal. The Portal enables customers to track the progress of their software project, providing functionality to report issues, keep up to date with tasks and issues, and view additional delivery information, such as burndown charts. It allows project stakeholders to drop pins where they want to add feedback or pinpoint an issue, automatically creating service request tickets in the project tracking system. This allows customers to take ownership of the work being done by putting them in control of progress. For online systems we have a test version online at all times. For standalone software we send you regular new versions for you to try.

6. Functionally Complete

At the end of the development stage, we deliver a software system which is “functionally complete” – i.e. we have no code left to write for features. The system will have had internal testing on each feature, but further testing begins at this point. We expect customers will want to be involved in system testing at this stage.

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7. System Completed

Testing is complete, and the new software system is ready for use. If required, we can assist with deployment – which may involve importing existing data.

We're easy to talk to - tell us what you need.

CONTACT US

Don't worry if you don't know about the technical stuff, we will happily discuss your ideas and advise you.