Know Your Options And Where To Start
OUR PROCESS
4. Weekly Builds
Weekly builds are sent for your approval and feedback.
1. Initial Proposal
We prepare an initial estimate based on your project requirements initial consultation.
2. Game Design Document
Working as partners, together we finalize a detailed game design document, including milestones and release dates.
5. Go Live
During this period, we monitor your application and fix any critical bugs as quickly as possible.
3. Daily Communications
Daily updates sent via email and JIRA (or Trello, Asana, Google Docs, Skype, etc).
6. Maintenance
We ensure your application is running smoothly, and implement new features as required.
Realization Process and Additional Services
Each project we realize goes through 3 main phases:
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Requirement and specifications
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Realization
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Maintenance
During each phase, we work closely with the client's product manager sending daily or weekly updates in addition to weekly builds for approval and feedback.
1 - Requirement and Specification Creation
We create design and specification documents to define and cover the entire scope of the project. The documents contain the following information:
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General product backlog: List with a short description of all the features that will be part of the project scope,
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Wireframes and storyboard: Outline of all the screens and possible actions for the user interface of the project,
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Final design: Final screens created by our design and art team under our Art Director
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Technical requirements: Specification of the technology that will be used, the platforms and devices that will support the project.
We work with the client product manager to validate each document before moving on with the next one. After all, documents are finished and validated on both sides the development phase can start.
2 - Realization: Agile Development Phase
The primary point of concern for any project should be communication, both internally and externally. Alley Labs has the ability to seamlessly integrate with your existing Project management Methodologies should you wish to internally contain your project. Internally, we act as an Agile Development company, helping us to respond more effectively to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and empirical feedback.
Agile Development is an alternative to traditional sequential development, and comprises of several iterative and incremental software development methodologies. In short, our process easily adapts at any stage and integrates for maximum effectiveness.
Scrum Methodology - Product Owner
The product owner will follow the development closely, control the progress and prioritize the work to ensure it is on track. The product owner will receive a new build at the end of each sprint and must test and verify each feature to make the final validation and supply detailed feedback.
We have two possible options on how we work with our clients depending on your required level of project control and time availability:
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Project Owner: The client is the product owner, you will be involved deeply in our development process and will be able to follow the team progress on a day to day basis. It requires more time and investment on the project.
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Project Validator: If time or resources are short, our Director of Engineering can be the product owner. In this scenario, you will receive final versions of the project after each milestone is reached and will give your validation and detailed feedback.
Scrum Methodology - General Product Backlog
The general product backlog is created during the requirement and specification phase, it will contain a list of user stories including all the features that will be part of the project.
Scrum Methodology - Detailed Sprint Backlog
Before starting each sprint the product owner will define which user stories will be part of the sprint. A detailed sprint backlog will be created with the detailed specification of each feature. The client will validate the specifications before the beginning of the sprint.
Scrum Methodology - Sprint
The Sprint is a fixed period of time, between 1 and 4 weeks. During each sprint the project team will have a goal to finish as many user stories as possible. A new build will be created for the client to test and view the progress at the end of each sprint.
Project Management Tool - JIRA
We use JIRA to manage our projects internally. We can give you a client access and allow you to view the live progress of the project with:
Customized Dashboards
You can have a quick overview on the status of the current active sprint as well as the global status and list of tasks for each planned release.
Active Sprint View
You can view and monitor the progress of the tasks and their status in the active sprint.
We are open to using any of your existing project management tools as an alternative approach. And are familiar with Trello, Redmine, HipChat, Confluence, Google Docs, Zoho and many others.
Source Code Versioning Control - GitHub
All of our code is versioned and secured in our private GitHub repository.
This allows us to have:
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No code lost, misplaced
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Complete history of all changes
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Backup of each deployment and easy, quick roll back if needed
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Our code review team to validate all code via pull requests before merging on the master branch
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Transparency with you to view our code
3 - Maintenance Phase
Corrective maintenance plan and Service Level Agreement
The following services are provided by the corrective maintenance phase:
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Monitor server and database to ensure the service is up and running properly. Apply fixes when required.
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Fix all bugs or errors found on the application.
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At the end of each month, if the number of days in the corrective maintenance have not been used entirely they can be used to work on new feature development or improvement upon request from the Company.
Incident and service requests
Incident and service requests are taken into account during the following working hours: Monday to Friday 8AM - 5PM UTC+07:00.
Ticket creation
All service requests or issues and bugs discovered on the application must be notified by creating a ticket via the ticketing tool provided by the Service provider, Jira.
Incident issue and bug response and resolution times
The Response time is the time from the ticket creation to the moment the Service provider gives a status update to the Company.
The Target Resolution Time is the total time from ticket creation to issue resolution and restoration of service to the user. Service may be restored either by a workaround or by a permanent solution.
Service request target response time
For all new service requests, Testing Hero will perform an analysis on the requirement and provide the client a time estimate for the realization of the service. Upon agreement of time and pricing the service will be performed. The pricing of the corrective maintenance is defined for each project.
Hosting Services
We have the possibility to provide Amazon Web Services instances and servers to host the project. Amazon Web Services offer fully scalable solutions, during the maintenance phase our System Operation team monitors and ensures the servers are performing to specification. For each specific project, we analyze the needs and suggest the best hosting solution. We charge the price of the Amazon Web Services directly and add no additional cost.
We have been working together for almost 10 years. I consider myself very lucky to have access to such a talented team for a variety of company needs.
- JUSTIN SIEGEL
CEO, MocoSpace