Fixed Price Development

Software, website and app development is a complex creative and technical process. If you’re not methodical and disciplined, costs can escalate and deadlines get missed. That’s why we offer a forward-thinking Fixed Price Development that gives a cast-iron cost and a clear timeline through every stage to completion.

With our Fixed Price Development, you know precisely where you are in terms of budget, development and delivery. As a client, you’re reassured from the outset and receive expert, professional service throughout. Here are the key benefits.

Get a fix on the process

Okay, so you’re sold on the benefits of Fixed Price Development, including the obvious potential cost-savings and the fact that we’ll deliver on-time, but where do we start and what can you expect?

1. Initial briefing

We start as all good relationships do, with an initial briefing meeting including key members of your team and ours. Face-to-face usually works best, but if that’s not possible, we’re happy to host a video or audio conference call. This is where we have the chance to get to know you, probe issues and get a deep understanding of your business, the project’s objectives and challenges. We’ll offer strategic and consultative advice and share our thoughts on how to achieve your goals.

2. Proposal creation

Once we’ve had chance to gather all the information and our thoughts, we’ll then concentrate on putting together our proposal. This will contain everything from the time estimated to complete the project and a fixed cost to precisely what your software will do. Our proposal will be highly-detailed and it will act as a template for our team of designers and engineers to create your final software, app or website solution.

The proposal breaks your project down into user roles, modules or screens and individual user stories and acceptance criteria which describe exactly what each user type can do.

3. Proposal sign-off

Ensure you’ve read, understand and agree with the proposal, fixed price and timings fully before signing it off. Your Account Manager will be in touch once you’ve had time to digest everything. Need changes? No problem, we’ll update and resubmit the proposal as many times as it takes to achieve your 100% satisfaction with every aspect of it. It has to be right as this is the document we’ll work to.

4. Project Managers

Give us the green light and our dedicated Project Manager and your elected Project Manager work together to take the project forward. You should choose your Project Manager carefully. Someone at your end who understands the project, will over-see the project and will be our single point of contact. Together, we’ll keep things moving and the project running like clockwork. Having this one direct contact keeps things simple, comms clear and avoids potential complications. Specific agreed protocols, expectations and responsibilities for both Project Managers are clearly set out in the proposal.

5. Designing the journey

Before a single line of code is written, we design the user journey based on the user stories and acceptance criteria agreed and signed off in the proposal. It’s essential that we invest time at this initial stage in understanding, developing and refining the user experience. We work closely with you when designing your software, working with your existing branding and marketing or creating a fresh brand style. After a meeting with you to discuss design ideas, one of our designers will come back and present our initial concepts created using a tool called InVision. You’ll see a small number of screens in three different designs for you to feedback on. Design workshops are also the perfect opportunity to get your comments and discuss your thoughts on our designs. Once final designs are refined and signed off, we can begin prototyping.

6. UI Protoyping

Our experienced UX designers take the signed off designs and create a full user interface prototype using InVision. This enables you to experience all the journeys users take around your site. Each screen mimics how a screen on the finished site or app will look and function. All buttons will link to the relevant pages. We then take your feedback and tweak the prototype. If something you ask for won’t work from a design perspective we’ll let you know why and suggest an alternative solution. Again, it’s important that you’re completely happy that the designs match the agreed user stories and acceptance criteria in the proposal before you sign the design prototype stage off and we begin the build.

7. Building with React

Our engineers use React because it enables them to write web applications entirely in JavaScript, which gives greater functionality than traditional applications without making the code more complex. We break the applications down into self-contained components as it speeds up development and reduces bugs in code. The result is cleaner software. We employ Virtual DOM to minimise the amount of physical rendering for browsers which makes your app highly responsive.

8. Back-End Dev

Happy with how your app looks and feels? Signed the build off? Our back-end engineers take care of what it actually does using a combination of ASP.NET Core and SQL server technologies. ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform application framework written in C# and can be run on Linux, Mac and Windows servers or cloud. .NET code can be shared between Web, Desktop, Mobile applications or even video games, which slashes development time as there’s no need for us to reinvent the wheel as your business grows. It also makes your app portable and scalable, so we can design your app form the start to run efficiently at any scale. Our Microsoft certified engineers also use SQL Server technology to create a stable and powerful platform to manage your application data and make it work for you with speed and efficiency.

9. Pre-launch tests

We never launch a piece of software without thoroughly testing it. Our internal testing team will exhaustively check the fully developed site against the agreed acceptance criteria and the signed-off prototype. Wherever possible, we sign-off each module as it’s completed and pass this to you to review module-by-module. We test every aspect of the software and test websites across Google Chrome v58+, Edge v14+, Internet Explorer v11, Firefox v53+, Safari v10+ and Opera v49+. Apps are tested on the operating system they’re built for, i.e. An iOS App will be tested on an iPhone and iPad. We also test against W3C AA Standards for Accessibility. Any faults are rectified within 7 working days.