Software Development Methodology

At Inkriti, we engage with our clients on two broad categories of software development : Project-based Application Development and Ongoing Long-Term Application Maintenance. For both these categories, our delivery methodology is uniquely adapted to :

• Globally Distributed Teams : Most of our engagements are conducted with a combination of US and India based engineers, project managers and business analysts. Our methodology is very focused on clear communication of requirements, good technical designs, rapid iterative development and smooth deployment.
• 3-12 Month Development Efforts : Our methodology excels at delivering on application development projects that last between three to twelve months. Typical team sizes range from 5 to 15 people, that work in an agile development mode resulting in high-quality releases every two-four  weeks.
• Ongoing Maintenance work with 2-3 week release cycles : For our ongoing maintenance projects,that are essentially extensions of a client's internal software development team, we tailor our methodology to result in high-quality bug fix and maintenance releases every 2-3 weeks.

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY

For application development efforts (that are not purely systems integration driven) Inkriti follows an iterative/agile development methodology  , wherein we break up the entire system into subsystems and modules within these subsystems. After doing this, the development team focuses on one module at a time, finishes it entirely, conducts developer testing and then hands it over to the testing team for further testing. After fixing the basic bugs in the module, the entire team moves onto the next module and so on. This kind of iterative methodology that ensures robust module development in 3-4 week cycles makes for good quality code, consistent progress and early problem identification.

PROCESS TOOLS

Through the project development cycle, teams at Inkriti use tools at different stages.

• Project Portals - Google Sites are extensively used in the development cycle. They serve as project portals with inbuilt knowledge management, document repository management, interaction with clients, and discussion boards that facilitate communication among the team members.

• Source Control - Subversion(SVN) is the primary configuration management tool. The code and other deliverables are maintained in SVN, along with regular backups
• Bug Tracking - JIRA is used as a bug tracking for all projects executed at Inkriti and is an integral part of the QA cycle. The application is also opened up for customers, who can login and check the status of issues any time round the clock.

PROJECT METRICS

At Inkriti, we believe in consistenly delivering projects on time, with quality and within budget. This has been made possible by defining and effectively tracking the projects at individual project level. The measurement of these metrics provide insights into the quality, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of our processes. These measurements provide the means to assess the "health" of the projects. Some of the metrics that we gather include

Application Development Projects :

Parameter - On Time Delivery

• Metric - Schedule Deviation (SD)
• Objective - Provides information about how well the project is being performed with respect to its schedule commitments.
• Frequency - End of each milestone.
• Measurement - Actual Schedule vs Planned Schedule (in %)

Parameter - Quality

• Metric - Defect Rate (DR)
• Objective - Provides the measurement of product quality. Gathering data over a period will also help teams arrive at a trend and can use this for forecasting.
• Frequency - Depends on project - number of defects is calculated daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
• Measurement - No. of Defects captured / Total Testing Time

Application Maintenance Projects :

  Parameter - On Time Delivery

• Metric - Schedule Deviation (SD)
• Objective - Provides information about how well the project is being performed with respect to its schedule commitments.
• Frequency - End of each milestone.
• Measurement - Acutal Schedule vs Planned Schedule (in %)

Parameter - Efficiency

• Metric - Back Log Management Index (BMI)
• Objective - To manage the backlog of open, unresolved, problems in the project
• Frequency - End of each build cycle
• Measurement - (No. of issues closed during the build / No. of issues arrived in the build) x 100

Parameter - Quality

• Metric - Post Delivery Defect Rate (PDD)
• Objective - To keep track of delivery issues and target to improve quality of deliverables and customer service.
• Frequency - End of each build cycle
• Measurement - ((Defects (Post Release) / Defects (Pre Release + Post Release)) * 100