Bear Den Designs

Exploration

Let's Write a Story, aka Release Planning

We believe in face to face meetings and knowing our customers. You have problems that need to be solved. You may not know how, but you can describe what you want in a story. Your stories drive our development. Your story becomes our story and sets the velocity for our development speed. In fact, the stories that you write, which will be 1-3 sentences, will dictate the releases of your application. In other words, you, the customer, establish what you want in your releases.

The stories you provide will become our requirements. It's much easier for you to define what you want than us. In addition, you don't have to speak any technical software development terms. Eventually these stories will be used to provide estimates for us to implement.

Estimate

Our design staff will evaluate your stories and provide "low risk" estimates for your job. Some stories are quite involved and so we may break them into several smaller stories to get a better grasp on time and effort involved. We may ask you to split the story too if we are having trouble getting our heads around it. We may combine stories so that they are at least 1 week IDT (Ideal Development Time).

This Ideal Development Time is how long it would take to implement the story in code if there were no distractions, no other assignments, and you knew exactly what to do. -XP

We will sort the stories into 3 piles. Like this:

1. 3 weeks IDT
2. 2 weeks IDT
3. 1 week IDT

Sort it Out

Now it's your turn. We have taken a good deal of effort to analyze your needs and provided you with estimates for all of your stories. There will likely be some stories more important than others for a system to be immediately useful. You need to sort your estimated stories into 3 piles:

1. Required for a working system
2. Meaningful or significant
3. Nice to have

Release Planning Meeting

Now you get to pick what stories will be implemented for each release. You will also pick the release dates.

Iteration Planning Meeting

Now the technical stuff. We will break your stories down into programming tasks. This iteration is a stepping stone to get to your final application. If you have chosen enough stories to fill say, 3 weeks IDT, then we will definitely release in 3 weeks. We may or may not get all of your stories implemented in that time frame. This is not a bad thing since our initial estimates were "pretty good" guesses. After the first release we will measure our velocity. That is, how much work is getting done on your project. It's simple. We will add up all of the estimates of the user stories that we finished during our iteration. This is our velocity. You may pick up to this amount on our next Release Planning Meeting but no more. Initially our velocity will go up and down but we will quickly find a rhythm that matches your needs.

Key Benefit

By saving time on a lengthy specification we are already developing and providing you functionality while you provide us feedback. Every iteration we learn more and communicate better.

Design

This encompasses both Graphical and Code. The overall look can be controlled entirely by us or if you have some ideas, please share. Our graphic designer, The Breaker embraces all things CSS and eschews the evil table for layout. (Unless of course it is tabular data then he loves the table) The Fixer, The Hackeralong with The Decider will spin your tales of lore into code that is well behaved and easy to maintain.

Test

Bear Den Designs has crawled from the muck and entanglement of PHP and has seen the bright red beacon of Ruby on Rails Testing is our hallmark which means that when your app is deployed it will work reliably and without fault.

Deploy

Automated deployment on our servers or yours. Changes happen violently fast like a Chuck Norris round-house. Ouch! Don't like the latest update? We can roll it back in seconds. Retool. Re-deploy.