Nika Craft

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Naradana WebSolutions is developing the Naradana Platform, a platform for rapid development of web applications based on our own method Holistic Programming, individual organisation software solutions and Naradoo - a product specifically designed for small companies providing an overall solution for all IT needs they have.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Nika Craft?

Technical and UI oriented development within the Naradana Platform: A generic UI control, fixing legacy bugs of the grid control, several UI improvements, reorganizing the database model for multi-language support, research and spike solutions for the migration of the code generators to node.js, especially in terms of multi-threading and database connectivity to PostgreSQL.

What were your goals for this project?

Improve certain functionality of the Naradana Platform. Evaluate technical challenges of the migration from ASP with JetEngine to node.js and PostgreSQL

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Based of good experience with NikaCraft in the past and a common understanding on how to apply human values in business.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The project consisted of several tasks driven by requirements of the overall developing of the Naradana Platform. The Naradana Platform has been built to support the method Holistic Programming. It leverages generative programming and though provides special challenges for the developers of system functions. The projected started with a training on Holistic Programming and the overall architecture of the Naradana Platform. We used a modification of Scrum to manage requirements and the task load of the developers. The developers needed to learn to program within the Naradana Platform, so it was an additional challenge to get accustomed to the new work environment, too. Due to the specific tasks and the need of transfer of detailed knowledge, the collaboration model provided intensive communication between Naradana and NikaCraft on an almost daily base. NikaCraft's involved developers provided programming in JavaScript on client-side and server-side, using Dojo to implement certain UI functionality and working with complex object models. NikaCraft provided research and development of node.js and related spike solutions. The projected needed to end quite abruptly solely because of unforeseen budget restrictions, and NikaCraft helped to transfer unfinished tasks back to Naradana.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of three developers. While still finishing their university degrees in parallel, they already came with significant expertise. The developer team was guided by a lead developer of NikaCraft and supported by the DevOp, who also worked on project specific tasks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

NikaCraft could push the Naradana Platform development forward in terms of functionality and experience with method Holistic Programming. Due to their expertise and programming results, the Platform came closer to be released to the public. The collaboration experience contributed to improvements of the Holistic Programming method itself.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was not part of NikaCrafts responsibility. The team was very responsive to the project management Naradana provided and was very flexible in adopting the specific demands we had.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

NikaCraft provided very high flexibility in collaboration style and adopting our new technology and method. We share a common attitude in terms of human values in the work environment. The communication capabilities are outstanding and helped to overcome any obstacles even before they could develop into collaboration problems. The company has very good knowledge of state-of-the-art technologies and beyond. The willingness of the developers to adjust to the special work environment and still providing constructive criticism was a significant contributions to the success of the collaboration - and highly enjoyable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

In the review of the project we found that we could not leverage the full potential of NikaCraft because of the budget limitations. Hence, testing and autonomous team management were cut short. Naturally, young developers tend to overestimate their performance - and the required guidance by an experienced developer was not provided, again due to budget limitations. The lesson leaned: providing more budget and a long-term perspective from our side would have helped NikaCraft to provide their full potential in all areas.