Services

Development Services

Producing working software involves writing code. We provide developers at various skill levels for long and short-term projects. Because we believe that strong, passionate developers are critical to keep the balance between quality and time/cost & functionality in the software development process, we ensure that there is always a senior partner level developer included in our development teams.

We have a constantly evolving set of skills, but pride ourselves in our strengths in:

• Java
• Ruby
• SQL

Development Process Best Practices

When compared to disciplines such as civil engineering, software development is still very young. As a result it is constantly evolving. When an organisation’s development team is focussed on delivering working software, there is often just no time to investigate the latest thinking around how that development process should be done.

Because CodeCraft IT is passionate about not only producing software, but how to produce it, we are able to advise on, and implement best practice processes for software development from end to end.

Our skills include:

• Agile development philosophy and process – produce software that provides real business benefit quickly, and repeatable, while maintaining flexibility

o   SCRUM

o   Kan Ban

• Continuous integration – take the pain out of taking software from the developer’s machines, to a deployable release.
• Continuous deployment – reduce risk of deploying code to production often.
• DevOps  - managing infrastructure as code, allowing rapid scaling and disaster recovery of software infrastructure.
• Release control – how to get code from testing into production.
• Source code management – how to manage source code across multiple teams and locations.
• Production monitoring and alerting – turn reactive systems monitoring into pro-active support.
• Issue tracking – software (such as JIRA) and processes for managing, tracking and reporting on development tasks, features and bugs.

Open Source Product Advice

The Open Source community provides software without license fees. To the cost-conscious organisation, this can be a very attractive offer, however, there is massive growth in the number and type of Open source products available in the world today. Organisations often find it hard to identify which of these products will provide stable, reliable, long-term benefit at the low cost of ownership that is a key to this thriving ecosystem.

CodeCraft IT monitors and evaluates the products in this ecosystem, and can advise on the what open source alternatives there are to expensive vendor products, and can advise on potential benefits and risks of using these alternatives.

Mentoring

As a developer, staying with on organisation for a long time provides invaluable understanding of the business processes and requirements. This is a key value of on-house staff. However, it often results in stale thinking, and not exploring or being exposed to new ideas.  At CodeCraft IT, we are passionate about technology, and the software development process, and we are equally passionate about sharing our knowledge. Because we always provide senior partner level developers on projects, we set up a natural environment for on-the-job mentoring and skills transfer both to our more junior developers, and to the client’s staff. Informal mentoring provides invaluable growth, without heavily impacting project timelines.

Training

In addition to on-the-job mentoring, CodeCraft IT also provides bespoke technical training. Technical training is typically short (less than a day) and focussed on a single technology, process, or technique, which allows the sessions to be integrated into a normal workday. It also allows us to tailor the course to the team’s specific needs and focus at the time.