Our Agile Development Process

The majority of website and application costs are the long-term maintenance: the costs of hiring people to change minor points of functionality, look and feel, or plug-in wholly new features to the website or application. Lisantra addresses that long-term problem with Agile development methodologies such as Extreme Programming or Scrum to keep projects on time and on budget while preserving its maintainability. The core of Agile Programming is breaking down the whole project into discreet chunks called iterations. Each iteration usually implements a single major feature and lasts several weeks. We segment our implementation into five steps.

• 1: Discover Your Needs
• 2: Design the Feature
• 3: Write Feature's Code
• 4: Test the Feature
• 5: Deploy the Feature

1 Discover Your Needs

Requirements are a list of features which your web application should have. Requirements discovery, tracking and fulfillment is an art unto itself. It is the first and most essential step of developing any successful web application.

2 Design a Feature

The architecting of a web application is the method of organizaing the files, directories which represent discreet entities. The results of this phase is a clear blueprint of what kind of production environment your web application will run in, which framework we will use to run it, what data it needs to run and the structure and organization of its pages.

3 Write Feature's Code

We craft our code using best practices which produce maintainable code with at a high level of quality. These best practices include writing self-documenting code, writing relevant documentation for end users, and writing tests alongside the actual code to ensure it does what we expect. We keep a complete history of our code in Version Control Systems to safely speed development.

4 Test the Feature

We conduct our automated testing phase on servers which resemble the application's operating environment as closely as possible. This reduces surprises or version incompatibilities during deployment of the application to its new home on the production server. We can replicate clients' production environments with virtual machines.

5 Deploy the Feature

The moment of truth, when we securely deploy the finished feature to your server(s) for all the world to see and for you to realize its benefit and value.