Software development

You can recognize successful software by the smiles on the faces of those who use it, and the big smile on the face of the sponsor. We love technology, but we love seeing our work used well even more. In the end, software should deliver value to you, your organisation and its’ community, software development is to serve your purpose. We can develop software in several ways:

1. Adapt existing open source software
2. Build extensions to open source software that support it
3. Build mini-applications for specific purposes, and make it look like a whole
4. Combine (’mash up’) several off the shelf open source applications, and make them appear as a whole
5. Have a completely custom solution developed for you

As you may see, we have a strong preference for using free and open source software. Open source is cheap to get started and cheap to change. That is not all – over the long term open source software is more likely to be maintained and updated – it is not possible for a vendor to be bought out and its product terminated by the buyer to control market share (as happens often with closed source software). We also like to publish relevant parts of solutions we develop, so that we support the ecosystem. If the software we publish is successful, it will give you free publicity and maybe even free enhancements developed by others. Of course, you can also go for the warm fuzzy feeling open source gives you . When you need custom software developed, be it from scratch or as an extenstion to off the shelf software, we will work closely with you. We’ll have a conversation with you, in which we will try to understand how software development could be most valuable to your organisation. We may feed this understanding back to you in the form of a formal proposal, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Therefore, when we start developing, we will show results soon and ask for your feedback in very short cycles. Each cycle is a few weeks maximum – if you are in a hurry or like to be very involved we can have daily cycles or even shorter. Short cycles enable you to steer development and get maximum value out of it. We also make it possible to release software early, so you can start earning back your investment soon.