Our Process
Our no-BS, outcome-oriented approach will solve your biggest challenges and help your company do better business now.
PLAN FOR BUSINESS RESULTS
We start by coming to an agreement of how success will be measured. Then, we work to understand your current process, how people interact with the solve the problem(s) today and where the real opportunities exist. From there, we create a project plan that’s tied directly with your needs and fits into your unique processes or ways of thinking.
DESIGN FOR YOUR USERS
With custom software, your customers and your employees are now your end-users. During the process, we’ll be engaging with them to ensure that we’re creating an experience that’s easy-to-use and accomplishes their goals quickly and effectively. We like to find out what motivates them, what demotivates them, what “jobs” need to be done, and much more.
DELIVER FOR IMMEDIATE ROI
We know custom software isn’t cheap, but we also know growing companies that employ tailor-made solutions have a unique competitive edge in their market. Our goal at the end of each project is to have you up and running on your new system quickly so you can start seeing a return on your investment.
MAINTAIN FOR LONG TERM SUCCESS
Software projects are rarely “done.” Most of the lifelong cost of a custom application is in the ongoing enhancements/maintenance and the infrastructure costs. Luckily, we’re with you for the long-haul. We’ll host, maintain and manage your system to keep it operating efficiently so you can see long-term cost savings and keep your system operational over a longer period of time.
ENGAGE – Pre-Project Consulting
How can we help you?
When you come talk to us about your software project, the first thing we do is listen and ask questions. We learn about your business and your project in order to understand your needs and determine whether FrogSlayer is a good fit. If we think we can help you, we’ll work with you to set a responsible budget and develop a project brief and proposal.
The project brief serves as a high-level description of your project and a corresponding schedule and budget range. We use early project requirements, historical data from previous projects, and our expertise to initially estimate cost. At this point, the estimate will have the broadest range. As we learn more about the project, the estimate will be refined. Learn more about our pre-project consulting process.
If you’re coming to us with an already existing code base then we’ll start out by going through a live demonstration of what’s been built so far. We’ll then conduct a formal code audit and prepare a “takeover plan” and roadmap to get your software in good shape.
PLAN – Discovery, Design, & Planning
Forget acronyms. We start in English.
Your project starts long before we write any code. Coding focuses on technologies and languages, but preparing for a software project involves the larger process of understanding your business, how you’ll measure ROI, user needs, potential risks and future opportunities. We’ll do this collaboratively – through discussion, sketching out workflows, and deciding on solutions. The best part of all is we don’t require you to learn our language; we communicate in yours.
You see, 70% of software projects fail. But not ours. We boast a 98% success rate when our clients complete a Discovery, Design & Planning engagement. We’ll remove all the guesswork upfront so you can de-risk your software project and accelerate development. Before a line of code is ever written, we get face-to-face to gain a deep understanding of your business, design the UI, lay out the requirements, and create a project plan to prevent rework, false starts, or wasting money on features that won’t get used.
Once we understand the problem and agree on the right solution, we’ll define the features that support the core application and create an accurate cost and schedule estimate for your software project. Learn more about our custom software project planning
BUILD – Custom Software Development
Creating your product
All of our design and development practices are aimed at producing maintainable, extensible, and highly usable software. We begin with the most essential features, so we deliver the most value early-on in the process.
We believe custom software isn’t just for the big guys. By building only what’s needed, you can affordably create custom-fit web and mobile applications that will enable your business to scale faster for years to come. We can build exactly what you need from scratch, takeover an existing code base, or even rescue a failed project from other vendors or freelancers.
MANAGE – Release, Host & Support
The first release
You hire us to build custom software in order to make or save money. Until it’s released, software can’t do either. We help you determine the proper hosting, licensing and distribution mechanism for your system. For example, whether it’s internal, shared, dedicated or cloud, our expertise is available to get your software safely deployed and responsibly hosted.
In for the long haul
Our goal is to keep you focused on growing your business while we worry about delivering the tools you need to become a technology leader. Whether you’re a startup or a growing company, we’re available for the long-term to maintain and extend your applications lifetime value and usefulness.
The easy stuff
Once we understand the problem and agree on the right solution, we’ll define the features that support the core application and create an accurate cost and schedule estimate for your software project. Learn more about our custom software project planning