Process

Clients come to us with varying levels of experience and clarity about what they want to develop. Our role often includes helping clients identify abstract goals, developing features that address those goals and the underlying architecture for those features, and finally the project implementation.

We understand that some clients appreciate frequent and ongoing dialogue with GVS, while others prefer to have less frequent communication. We are confident in our project management skills and are happy to develop projects while communicating with the client as frequently -- or infrequently -- as they prefer.

In general, we follow these steps in developing a new website:

1. Identify project goals
2. Identify features that meet those goals
3. Develop designs and architecture for those features
4. Implement the design and features
5. User acceptance testing and revisions
6. Project deployment and performance tuning
7. Ongoing support and maintenance

GVS approaches development with an Agile/Scrum-based strategy where we revisit the above steps 2 through 6 in iterations throughout a project.

We divide project specifications into discrete elements and estimate the amount of time necessary to build that functionality. We identify a specific set of these elements and build them in a development sprint, usually lasting two weeks. During this time we have regular client contact through whichever means of communication the client prefers. GVS uses a custom internal project management application built in Drupal, which makes it easy for stakeholders and other team members to stay up to date on projects with email subscriptions, and a central, organized log of discussion about specific parts of the project.

Each sprint ends with a demonstration of the features and user acceptance. We deploy projects according to Drupal and general server best practices, so that they can be easily maintained by us, your staff, or another company.

The combination of periodic informal reviews with the project leads and more open, complete feature reviews at the end of each scrum keeps clients informed and involved in the project as it progresses.