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Most software programs fail in the first two phases — before any code is written. Scope is signed off without architecture; architecture is signed off without scope; and the team that runs the discovery is replaced by a delivery team that wasn't in the room. The result is a project that drifts the moment implementation starts. Our methodology is built to prevent that pattern.
Five phases, one engineering team. Discover and Design are sequential and produce signed-off documents — architecture, scope, milestones, and acceptance criteria — that govern everything that follows. Build and Validate run iteratively against those documents. Launch & Support transfers ownership to your team with monitoring, runbooks, and direct access to the engineers who built the system. The same engineers throughout.
Discovery is structured, not exploratory. We run stakeholder workshops with the people who own the problem — business, operations, IT, finance — to surface the requirements that don't appear in any document. We review the existing technical landscape: systems, data, integrations, constraints, and the assumptions baked into how things run today.
The output is a documented Discovery package: problem statement, business goals, technical landscape map, stakeholder map, and the constraints that will shape the architecture. No solutions are proposed during Discover. Solutioning prematurely is how the wrong architecture gets entrenched before it's been reviewed.
Design produces the artefacts implementation will be measured against. Solution architecture covering system structure, integration patterns, data flows, and the security model. Technology selection driven by your team's capacity, your compliance requirements, and the long-term maintainability of the stack — not by what the engineers who happen to be available prefer to write.
Scope and milestones are documented explicitly: what's in, what's out, what's deferred, and what triggers each phase boundary. Acceptance criteria per milestone. Architecture Decision Records explain why each major design choice was made — so the rationale survives team rotations and audit conversations later.
Build runs in short iterative sprints with regular demos. You interact with working software early — not after months of invisible effort — and feedback shapes the next cycle. Every change goes through peer code review; nothing reaches main without a second engineer's sign-off.
Continuous integration runs automated tests on every commit. Code is documented at the level a future maintainer needs to understand it — not over-documented for ceremony, not under-documented for speed. The codebase is engineered for the team that will inherit it.
Validate runs alongside Build, not after it. Functional QA covers the happy path; failure-mode testing covers retry, recovery, and graceful degradation. Automated regression suites grow with the codebase so changes don't break behaviour silently. Cross-browser, cross-device, and accessibility testing are part of the standard pass.
Client review sessions happen at every milestone — your team sees working functionality and signs off against the documented acceptance criteria. We support User Acceptance Testing with structured test plans, issue triage, and direct engineer access for clarifications. UAT findings are categorized, prioritized, and resolved before cutover.
Launch is a controlled change, not a big-bang event. Production deployment is rehearsed in a dry-run before it's executed live. Monitoring, alerting, and incident response are configured before traffic flows — not after the first incident. Runbooks document the operational scenarios your team will see day-to-day.
Knowledge transfer is structured: documentation walkthroughs, system architecture sessions, and pairing time with your team. After the initial stabilization period, ongoing support is offered as a separate engagement with response-time SLAs and direct access to the engineers who built the system. No first-line ticket queue between your team and the people who know the codebase.