18 Questions Syndicode Is Usually Asked by Potential Clients

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Syndicode
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18 questions Syndicode is usually asked by potential clients.

Maybe life is still an unanswered question, but there are some questions we can try to answer. The Discovery Session usually enables managers and developers to examine the client’s request and provide a detailed answer to each of the questions. But our potential clients still tend to ask us about our company, skills, instruments, and organization of the work process. So there is a perfect time to select 18 questions Syndicode is usually asked by potential clients and shed some light on this matter in this article.

These are real questions from one of our clients that he had asked us before starting the work. We decided to share them, so our potential customers could already be equipped with useful information.

This will be the ‘question-answer’ format for your convenience. So, let’s start from the very beginning:

1. Which Delivery Model Will the Project Use?

Syndicode developers prefer to use the Milestone delivery model and connect Milestones to the business features. For example, Milestone for Registration/Sign in+Sign Up, Milestone for Main Dashboard, etc. Milestone can consist of one or several sprints. The choice of the Delivery Model also depends on the business logic of the project. Then there is a connection of payments from the client side to the developer’s Milestones. The company’s software lifecycle consists of the following stages:

  1. Data collection
  2. Data analysis
  3. Design
  4. Planning
  5. Estimation of time (estimate)
  6. Development
  7. Testing
  8. Testing by the customer
  9. Deploy
  10. Support

In addition, we recommend you explore custom software development process stages we covered in detail for all possible cases.

2. For Agile-Based Projects: How Long Are Sprints/Do Iterations Last?

Usually, it takes two weeks with the Demo on a 10th sprint day. For you to understand what Agile is – read about the top-6 software development methodologies available nowadays.

3. How Big Will Be a Team Working on the Project?

Syndicode is very flexible regarding the number of team workers. It is often based on the requirements of the client, like timeline and budget. Most frequently, the team consists of

  • 2 backend developers,
  • 2 frontend developers,
  • 1 QA engineer, and
  • 1 PM (project manager).

4. Which Communication Tools Will the Company Be Using?

Syndicode prefers using Skype, Slack, Google Hangout.

5. Which Collaboration Tools Will the Company Be Using?

Syndicode prefers using Jira, Trello, and Basecamp.

6. How Will the Final Product Be Distributed?

The final quality assurance is creating Final Demo of the whole product scope. Then the company waits for the final payment from the client’s side, and if everything is fine the code base is delivered as well as the full deployment on the production server and further project maintenance.

7. Are the Developers Free to Use Whatever Technology Stack Works for Them, or Is It up to a Customer?

Syndicode’s main tech stack is based on Ruby on Rails, React.js, PHP and WordPress. That is a good stack to develop marketplaces of any complexity. But the company can hire the client’s dedicated team per requirements if needed, however, it could take some additional time.

8. What Are the Most Significant Technical Risks on the Project?

The main risks are:

  • Working with third-party APIs that do not have documentation or written bad code practices.
  • Additional features without increasing the budget.
  • Not correct estimation of the project development timeline.

To avoid all these risks it’s better to have the technical specification and split the milestones on simple understandable sprints.

9. What Are the Key Milestones?

That fully depends on the project. But, see some examples here.

10. What Are the Development Processes?

The best case scenario of the development process looks like this:

  1. Discovery Session
  2. Ball-park estimate
  3. UX creation
  4. Updated estimation based on the clickable low-fidelity prototype
  5. UI creation
  6. Development backlog creation
  7. Splitting backlog on sprints
  8. Sprint-by-sprint development of MVP

11. What Quality Control (QC) Processes Does the Company Has in Place?

The QC process includes the coordination of requirements and its comparison with the already working functionality. QC is a certain indicator of the testing process, if a module, feature, the block has been tested, then this functionality corresponds to QC, and meets the required criteria.

12. What Quality Assurance (QA) Processes Does the Company Has in Place?

The QA process is structured as follows: at the stage of planning (workshop) the company finds out the nuances and makes adjustments to the client’s “wishes” taking into account the specifics of the technical implementation, collects additional information, clarifies the requirements for the product. After the designers are ready with the design, the developers conduct a test of UI and UX and inform the client how to fix it and then give it back for revision. At the development stage, the developers start testing the product itself including the creation of test documentation (test cases, check sheets, test plan, acceptance tests).

13. What Is the Company’s Deployment Strategy?

The company follows the best common practice using 2 connected servers:

  • Test server for the new features and
  • Production server for already tested and approved Milestones/Sprints/Features.

14. What Is the Company’s Provisioning Strategy?

Cost-efficient Provisioning strategy for Multiple concurrent Services (CPMS) in distributed clouds is proposed by formulating and solving a two-stage stochastic programming model. The objective of this model is to minimize the resource cost of purchasing VMs in the first stage and maximize the expected profit in the second stage.

15. What Is the Company’s Issue Tracking Process?

If the team meets the new API or the new tool to implement, they provide the analysis and make the prediction on the required development time. The developers always discuss all details with the client if more lightweight analog already exists on the market. The analysis time is always included in implementation time.

16. What Is the Customer Issue Tracking Process?

Each engineer working on the project provides a weekly report of spent hours.

17. Who Will Be Responsible for What?

The company can take responsibility for the design and development processes. The best case scenario will be if there is a technical engineer from the side of the client. He would help the team to write down the acceptance criteria of the future marketplace together with the user stories. He might also help the client to ‘translate’ Syndicode’s technical requirements on more simple business language.

18. What Issues and Concerns Remain After All Topics Above Have Been Considered?

When the client offers an idea of (let’s say) the marketplace, she/he has to keep in mind that the team knows nothing about the particular marketplace itself: does it have analogs, will the client provide the developers with the technical specification and low-fidelity clickable prototype or at least hand-made wireframes. The client always describes his business idea briefly, however, the developers need some visualization of the future product.

We hope you can find these questions and answers useful, so the next time you are going to start working with us, don’t hesitate to check this information and be fully equipped. If you ready to invest in your future software development process, ask Syndicode dedicated engineers about custom software development!