Our teamwork

Our statement is:

Experienced experts are a foundation and a capital for success in IT industry. Relationships between them merge their knowledge into the power. Well-organized process achieves success from that power. Properly chosen and effectively used management tools decrease coordination efforts and allow concentrating on the result - the product itself. 

The team

At the moment our team consists of over 30 developers and tends to grow up. Each of us has a broad experience in different projects, using many programming and script languages. A lot of popular and acknowledged techniques as well as world proven methodologies guide us in project implementation.

Much attention is paid in IntexSoft to a good tradition of communications inside the team and of personal motivation. We have 2 requirements to the people who are hired by us: they should be talented IT experts and they should be good team players. We declare - work, initiative and help to each other get paid. That's why 

• we are not simply a set of developers but a strong team with interchangeable specialists.
• we DO NOT have staff rotation - scourge of outsourcing companies. There was NOBODY who has left our company since the beginning.

The team is driven by our leaders:

The headman:

• 12 years experience of software development
• 7 years experience in project management
• 8 years experience in team leading
  
• Certified by Carnegie Mellon University in course "Leadership and teamwork in IT industry"
• Certified by IPM business school in course “URBAN TIME” (effective time management)
• Certified by IPM business school in course “Development of motivation system for employees”
• Teacher on the staff of Grodno State University, the faculty of Programming and IT.

Group leaders:

• At least 10 years experience of software development;
• Experts in several areas of programming techniques;
• Possessing leader and organizational skills.

It's important for our international business that all our software developers speak English. Therefore we regularly organize trainings for improving their English skills and controlling their level of communicability. 

The process and tools

We effectively combine 2 ways of internal development process organization:

• informal communication in the active development phases which saves the time spent for work coordination and stimulates the spread of knowledge inside the team;
• process-oriented approach which assumes a preset of roles for code style and policies, code support, bug-tracking and bug-fixing, implementation planning and control.

In a tight contact our specialists give us rapid product development, high responsibility and interchangeability. Our abstemious process, supported by software tools, gives us the control over the development; each moment we can see if our intermediate results match our plans; each moment we can fast and effectively influence the development.

In the development process we use headmost software for object-oriented modeling, code development, memory and CPU profiling, code analyzing, DB modeling and so on.

But only the effective usage of tools for supporting development projects allowed us to have 8 projects in the development phase and almost 10 at support simultaneously!

Planning

Planning is an important part of project lifecycle. We pay much attention to creating plans, updating them and controlling project state. With proper planning, both developer and customer have the common look at the project state.

We have collected a lot of experience-based knowledge about stages of lifecycle. Being technology experts, our project leaders are able to give precise estimations of implementation efforts.

We get benefit from project-planning tools per years. Ms Project and A-PLAN are the tools our customers and we prefer nowadays.

Issue Tracking and Feedback Support

Phone calls are forgotten. Emails are lost. ICQ logs are too unstructured.
Efficient knowledge exchange between developers, implementers and customers, discussing the task and its results is not possible without appropriate technical support.

Issue tracking tools give us the possibility to

• have different extracts of open questions per project, person or period;
• see links between tasks, their dependencies on each other and certain persons;
• never lose something which was discussed already which makes changes of doing something twice less;

There are many solutions on the market, and we are sure that developers' team must use one of them. We have chosen open-source tool Bugzilla which is one of acknowledged leaders in systems of that class. Perfectly knowing principles of task- and bug-flow on the example of this system, we are able to use other system if our customers prefer it.

Testing

Testing is an essential part of software development. The primal testing of system functionality is performed by the developers themselves; final testing happens during acceptance of work and system maintenance by the customer.

IntexSoft holds quality assistance (QA) department which performs independent thorough testing before releasing versions to the customer. This element significantly improves the quality of products and minimizes time leacks by the customer for revelation and elimination of defects. 

Conducting and keeping test plans is performed using specific system TestLink.

In the testing process we use as manual testing as creating automatic test procedures based on products Quick Test Professional and WinRunner.

Version Control

There's no need to explain how important is the usage of version control system for software development. Our project development is fast and effective because our developers:

• Always know what they have done, and after fixing any bug may definitely tell where the bug was in the code;
• They aren't subject to the syndrome "don't touch it when it works", and can start any complicated experiments with their code;
• They easily create a workspace for any supported project and are able to make parallel module development and support many versions of the software.

With CVS, per years we are able to develop several versions of the same project simultaneously. Bug fixes and small features for released project version do never stop development in the trunk.

IntexSoft has collected abundant knowledge about managing repositories, tagging, branching strategies, merging and conflict resolving. We have developed our own plug-ins for CVS to improve the process with tag naming control, sending notifications and much more.

Do you prefer other version control systems like Visual SourceSafe, becoming more and more popular Subversion or any other system? It's no problem for us, because we know the "roles"!

Documentation

As a good architectural building needs documentation, the complex software project is also hardly imaginable without detailed documentation. We do not only try to keep the technical documentation up to date but also try to keep the source code as documented as it is necessary to reuse and support it.

Auto-build

Almost all the projects, which are developed by us, can be built by just one command in Windows and/or in - nix environments. All dependent projects are rebuilt in the required versions as well. This simplifies the software delivery, ensures the software consistency and as consequence - simplifies and reduces the installation and maintenance efforts. 

Geographically Distributed Development

In modern IT world, projects are not always developed in one office and even city. Because of many dependencies between project modules, developers should exchange the most recent source code between offices. The developer, who has a business trip to the office in another city, should be able to continue his work from the same place as he left it in the home office.

Geography makes the problem there. How to exchange the sources so that developer should not care of this? How to use Internet connection bandwidth effectively? How can we avoid file version conflicts that are resolved fast inside one room but need a long communication process with another city?

Here in IntexSoft we overcame those obstacles. For years we have been developing projects simultaneously with developers from 3 offices separated by hundreds of kilometers.

The tool called CVSup® provided us with great communication possibilities. When customized by us to enhance the process to our needs, it made us to forget the problems mentioned above.

Equipment

Time of the expert is valuable and irreplaceable resource in today's intensely competitive world. "Less routine work, more constructive labour" - that's formula for fastening development. That's why IntexSoft does not save on the equipment. We provide our staff with powerful workstations, wide-band Internet connection. Necessary amount of test servers of different architecture and operational systems improve our testing. Communication and demo servers work 24*7 all the year round.
All of them were configured by ourselves, so we know how to install and use different kinds of network services and software for UNIX, Windows and Apple Macintosh.