Software Development Lifecycle

Experience on the field has demonstrated over the years that waterfall like methodologies tend to disregard the fact that over time, requirements change. At Orckestra, we tend to take a more flexible approach based on an iterative process where the result tends to evolve to fit more and more the business needs as the project evolves. Business users get to see results early on during the project phase through prototyping and improvements.

In order to be successful in delivering a software or application development project, a variety of factors must be taken into consideration. Most of those factors are independent from the actual development of the application itself. Here are some of the factors which may cause project failures:

  • Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals
  • Inaccurate estimates of needed resources
  • Badly defined system requirements
  • Poor reporting of the project's status
  • Unmanaged risks
  • Poor communication among customers, developers, and users
  • Sloppy development practices

Orckestra believes that most of these factors can be addressed through the proper use of a common, integrated system shared by developers, architects, project managers and operations teams. By using the Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server environment, a project team will be able to accomplish the following goals:

  • use of a common system allowing to share, publish and collaborate project information
  • have an easily reportable view over a project’s progress and evolution
  • easily track a project’s different items such as issues, bugs, risks and requirements and link them into an understandable hierarchy
  • use of departmental or enterprise wide development methodology to enforce and standardize development practices and policies

All of these features are integrated in a united platform shared amongst the different members of a project team. Obviously, one cannot expect to accomplish all of these objectives overnight and that is why Orckestra develops with its clients a gradual integration plan which

  • evaluates the specific needs of a given organization through workshops with the different members of the organization (developers, team leads, project managers, operations team members)
  • evaluates the level of maturity of the company to gradually absorb and embrace the new processes of the platform within the company
  • provides a step by step approach with the supplement of Orckestra consultants in order to ensure a smooth integration and a successful application of the platform on targeted projects