Our Principles

1. Close Client Collaboration

Active client participation is an important success factor. We consider product managers and system administrators to be members of the project team and encourage them to concretely contribute to all of the project phases.

2. Prioritizing Value Added Features

While conventional development methodologies are geared for only a few large-scale implementations – sometimes only after a few years of ongoing development - (Big Bang), AXON believes that regular small-scale implementations are more profitable.

By organizing a project into targeted features and by first implementing those that add the most business value, the organization accelerates the return on its investment. Furthermore, this approach allows to carry out each step of the process – from design to implementation - early on and to address any problems that arise from the start. Implementations that follow benefit from a process that has been smoothed out and runs more efficiently.

This method, however, calls on the participation of all project participants – system designers, developers, QA analysts, system administrators and users – within a short time frame and requires good preparation and a structured approach.

3. Planning and Estimation

AXON believes that planning and estimation are of the utmost importance.

Some are critical of AGILE, as they believe it is devoid of any form of planning or project management, but this far from true of our methodology. Planning and estimation are at the very heart of our development process.

Estimation is a crucial step in the planning process to which all members of the development team contribute. In fact, a single person cannot possess all of the required knowledge and have the competencies to provide estimates for all of the components a complex project involves. During structured workshops that involve the entire project team, different team members can provide viewpoints that will contribute to providing better estimates.

With reasonably accurate estimates, planning can be considered 80% complete. A global plan that takes time constraints into account can then be established.

4. Rigorous Project Management and Documentation

In order to keep clients informed of project advancement and to enable the project team to be most efficient, our project management process includes daily team meetings (Scrum meetings), weekly statuses and detailed iteration statuses. We support this process with the use of recognized tools such as Jira Agile, Confluence and Alfresco.

Project management must provide control measures and make room for required improvements. To complement the conventional project planning of timelines and budgets, we have derived additional indicators to monitor for code quality, the adequacy of documentation, unit tests and automated testing processes and the handling of late tasks and critical issues. These indicators allow for adjustments to be made as required and help keep the project on course.

Documentation is planned in order to cover both project development requirements and system support requirements throughout the system’s life cycle. Design documents and documentation used solely for project development are kept simple in order to avoid unnecessary costs. A documentation plan is established at the onset of every project.