DevBranch

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Business Development Manager in a software development company that serves and expands its email marketing tools.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch, and what were your goals?

We were interested in making a PHP SDK and Drupal module for one of our email delivery services.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We've searched for a reliable partner with relevant expertise. DevBranch seemed a perfect match as they already created a similar Drupal module for one well-known ESP.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Our cooperation started with a consistent step-by-step kick-off meeting, where all the tasks and conditions were discussed. The deliveries for this stage included:

1. Pre-release of PHP SDK;
2. drupal.org module;
3. Instruction for Drupal module.

Everything was done as agreed.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Three people were in a core team: Team Lead, Developer, and Business Development Manager. In addition, a CTO could also be involved in communication for extraordinary cases.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

While it is to far to say about any measurable outcomes, deliverables meet our expectations well enough.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

All the work was done within several weeks, according to the agreed timeline. We could follow the development process through all these periods via daily reports in Slack and time tracking in Jira.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Everyone on the team was friendly, responsive, and result-oriented.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I believe there always are some areas for improvement, but at this stage, I can hardly give any advice to the DevBranch team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the co-founder and tech lead for a 40 person web agency specializing in Drupal, with staff in Montreal Canada and all over the world.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch?

DevBranch provided a senior developer for the duration of the last 18 months, who worked on several major enterprise-level projects for major Quebec government and private clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select this agency and what were the deciding factors?

I was aware of DevBranch and their excellent reputation for quality thanks to my personal connections in the Ukranian Drupal community.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Our developer typically would act as the lead back-end Drupal dev, working with a front-end and PM from our team. The various projects involved architecture, custom Drupal intranet features including user accounts, performance optimization, and building a very heavily customized mapping UI using Leaflet, and various integrations including CRMs and ERPs.

Describe the recruitment process in detail.

We interviewed several developers via the same process we do for full-time staff for our company, judging Drupal technical knowledge, coding ability, writing ability, and English level.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the engagement that demonstrate progress or success?

We are always impressed with the quality and speed of the code, issue writeups, documentation, and community contribution. When a project is tight or challenging, our PMs consistently fight to have the DevBranch devs assigned to their project.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

There's a challenge with timezones (we're in North America and DevBranch is in Ukraine) but both teams make it work because of excellent communication and high quality of work. This aspect was surprisingly a non-issue. The DevBranch staff regularly stay till online 1pm our time, and later when needed.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their commitment to quality and work ethic on behalf of both staff and management was incredible.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Wish they had more senior resources available for us.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Sales and marketing specializing in lead generation for the financial and insurance industry

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch, and what were your goals?

On going work in developing and migrating all our company websites to the Drupal 8 platform from a variety of older CMS's. They continue to help with backend API work as well as updating themes and custom module work.

SOLUTION

How did you select DevBranch and what were the deciding factors?

We started with small projects with the company founders and now work with a variety of people who really know their stuff. Speed and responsiveness kept us coming back to initiate new projects with them.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Development of Drupal 7/8 sites from start to finish as well as migrating data from other platforms.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Multiple and varied. Hard to be specific especially since this has occurred over 5 years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Our sites have always ended up clean and fast and the process has always been fully documented and done correctly.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Skype and Trello cards have helped keep us moving things along. Communication has always been excellent and warnings of any possible delays are always timely.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their ability to finish the work and projects in a timely manner is impressive. We have worked with enough other agencies and freelancers to know when we are being milked for hours and dollars. We have never had that worry with Dev-Branch.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Reasonat is a digital agency in Israel who works with big clients in the Israely market. I am the CTO and partner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch, and what were your goals?

We had a huge Drupal website, E-commerce selling tickets with lots of custom functions and screens. We were out of team capacity and looked for outsource solution.

SOLUTION

How did you select DevBranch and what were the deciding factors?

We already worked before with DevBranch and have been very happy and satisfied with the quality of service and development work done by them.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

In the past 10 month we work with - Full time junior developer. - Part time senior developer. Both Drupal backend and frontend developers.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

- Full time junior developer. - Part time senior developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

No

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We use Jira to manage tasks and Slack to internal communications. I was the PM of the project and there were 2 more developers from my team working together with DevBranch team.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Except from being super kind, even in some stress times, they were always supper care about the project success, as if the client belong to them. The two developers we work with always keep learning and provide their knowledge and experience with no worry.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Can't think of one now.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are an IT software and hardware reseller in Poland

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch?

We are currently updating our e-commerce website and we needed somebody to clean the code, make the site faster and more SEO compliant.

What were your goals for this project?

Our main focus was on website performance

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

By searching on upwork we found DEV Branch and one of they key focus points was performance optimization

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Dev Branch increased significantly the performance of our Drupal 7 website and cleaned up the code to Drupal standards.

What was the team composition?

The team had 3 people working on our project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our faster website has increased SEO performance which drives more revenue.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Very good and on point, good communication and problem solving.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Very professional, very good communication skills and technical knowledge.

Are there any areas for improvement?

N/A

BACKGROUND

What challenge were you trying to address with DevBranch?

I needed help with Drupal development for my company. I had been creating my website in Drupal, but I had a lot of ideas I couldn’t do by myself. For example, if a client was interested in a certain sword, the site would let the user know about related items. Also, my articles about weapons would link to other items I sold. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the scope of their involvement?

A friend of mine made a basic sketch of the design, and then DevBranch custom developed it for me in Drupal. I had trouble picturing what I really wanted, so I kept on adding features, and it evolved over the last two years into what it is today.

It has many pages, which contain about 300 items total describing weapons. The platform also incorporates content marketing to bring more sellers and buyers into my network.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with five people from their team. I had one dedicated person who was more of a site architect, and I’ve also worked directly with the developers.

How did you come to work with DevBranch?

A friend of mine who had a couple of startups had worked with them before and recommended them to me.

How much have you invested in them?

I have spent around $6,000–$7,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in June 2017, and it is an ongoing relationship.

SOLUTION

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Everything has gone pretty smoothly. The website became a quick marketing tool, and it also differentiates me in the market because most of my competitors don’t know much about the internet. 

How did DevBranch perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve always had a team ready to work with me.  Whenever there’s an important task, they always meet the deadline.  Any delays have mainly been due to me. 

We communicate via Trello and Slack. Even though my knowledge is limited, I’ve always been able to communicate quite well with them. I put in a request and they take care of it. We’ve occasionally used email but that’s mostly for invoicing and other things like that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of their work is very good. If I were to do the same project in Holland, the price would be five times higher. I was pleasantly surprised that even though it was less expensive, the quality was still good.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s been a little bit of a language barrier at times, but I expected that to happen. Sometimes we just misunderstand each other. They did a really good job.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m an executive at a website development company that primarily serves charities, social enterprises, and nonprofits.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire this vendor?

We’ve hired DevBranch to provide outsourced Drupal website development support.

What were your goals for this project?

We’ve relied on DevBranch for robust backend development work for several of our websites. We expect to utilize the best coding practices in our efforts to build websites that are easy to maintain.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Alexey (Business Development Manager, DevBranch) spoke at a Drupal event and met with our technical manager at the time. It was a promising first interaction, so we agreed to a small, fixed-priced project. Since then, we’ve moved on to larger projects on a timesheet basis.

Describe the project in detail.

We’ve completed a number of projects with DevBranch. Our most significant partnerships have included a community housing website and adapting our existing church-finding service as a white-label site for partners to use.  

What was the team composition?

We’ve worked with Oleh (Drupal Developer, DevBranch) and Victor (Drupal Developer, DevBranch) on different projects. We also work with a producer, a designer/frontend developer, and their creative/tech managers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

It’s too early to gauge the success of these projects, but our clients are pleased and are commissioning further work and improvements.

We have a small and very busy team servicing more than 80 clients, so our in-house capacity is limited. Working with DevBranch has substantially improved our ability and confidence to deliver Drupal products.

How effective is your workflow between your team and theirs?

We use Jira to facilitate our Kanban process. Our teams work well together, particularly when we have the developers’ full attention. It becomes more difficult when projects are coming to a close and they’ve moved on to other tasks while we’re still trying to make small changes.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Generally, their work meets our standards and is very dependable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

On occasion, the developers have gone over the allotted hours to perform a certain amount of work, which then causes delays elsewhere. We will have to monitor this better going forward.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a project manager at a web development agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with DevBranch?

We had a website that was experiencing speed issues when people searched for products. The site was running Apache Solr, which is a storage engine that’s supposed to speed up searches. After DevBranch reconfigured Apache and solved the issue, we continued to work with them. Since then, they’ve helped us on about 10 different projects.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They recently finished integrating one of our client's website with Microsoft Dynamics, allowing customers to order products directly from the site. Our client's internal team can also update their product information from one place, and it will populate across several local databases. Overall, the system has a new frontend that’s easier for customers to interact with.

Currently, they’re finishing the first stage of a long-term project, which has them creating a real-time rendering tool so customers can see what their custom products will look like.

What is the team composition?

I normally work with 1–2 developers at a time. I’ve worked with eight in total, and they’ve all been great. I work with a team for every project that usually includes 3–4 people.

How did you come to work with DevBranch?

I found them on Upwork. Our first project was on a Drupal website, so I specifically looked for someone with Drupal capabilities, as well as strong overall knowledge, experience and, understanding of what our end goal was. We also needed someone who was fluent in English.

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve spent more than $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since 2016.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Anecdotally, we were working on a two-year project prior to hiring DevBranch, and it was full of issues and bugs. They took over the project after it launched and it’s been perfect ever since. If we’d hired them from the beginning, it would have only taken six months.

Every project they’ve touched has gone smoothly, and I couldn’t ask for anything more. The products we deliver to our clients are of much higher quality when DevBranch works on them. They cut down on revisions and always hit their time estimates. Thanks to their work, which makes fewer mistakes than other products, our customers save money.

Bugs and issues are very rare. They have a great internal review process. By the time products get to me, they only have minor issues – something that can be fixed with a quick adjustment. Our clients rarely have to make revisions.

How did DevBranch perform from a project management standpoint?

I talk to them daily. We’re in constant communication, usually over Skype. If I slack off entering something into the CRM, they take care of it, so I don’t have to do anything. I’m never forced to remind them of anything, either. They make sure whatever I say gets done.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They view each project as a whole. If I tell them to do something, they know how it'll affect everything else. Since our projects are complex, changing one thing could have far-reaching implications. If we have an immediate need, they’ll take care of it right away. I send all my projects to them if I can.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not that I’ve seen.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Lay out all the details you have because the more DevBranch knows, the better the project will be. There’s going to be work upfront on your end to send DevBranch all the information they need, but you get the best results when you work as a team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CTO and application architect of System Solutions Inc. We’re a full-service app development and hosting company that targets mid- to large-sized nonprofit associations. We build and maintain a set of tools called eSuiteTools.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch?

We approached them to implement an enterprise CMS, from design and development all the way through to the deployment phases.

SOLUTION

Describe the project in detail.

Collaborating with our project management team, they’ve worked to implement the CMS. We’re currently still working on the implementation. For development and theming, they’ve used Drupal 6, 7, and 8. In terms of software and languages, they’ve used Linux, Git, PHP, MySQL, Nginx, Docker, CSS, Sass, and Less.

How did you select this vendor?

We originally found them on Upwork. I created a test for them that was designed to not be completed. They actually completed it correctly in less time than we gave them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

So far, they’ve seamlessly incorporated themselves into our team and have provided a high quality of service. We also appreciate their technical advice.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their project management is excellent. We use Jira to track progress.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Intelligent, honest, and humble, they always keep their commitments. Furthermore, I applaud their communication skills. They’re able to understand advanced technical concepts and convey them in layman’s terms.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the founder and head of business development for a portfolio of websites, mainly in the education and entertainment verticals.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire DevBranch?

We acquired a few websites that ran on very antiquated code and needed to be completely migrated.

What were your goals for this project?

They needed to migrate the websites to Drupal 8 while maintaining the URL structure, and all reviews and articles.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We searched vendors via popular freelancing websites. After interviewing a few potential agencies, we decided DevBranch was a good fit.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

For the first website, we provided them with an updated design and they completed the migration within a few months. That site featured a phpBB forum that we decided to keep separate. Currently, the first project is completed and they’re moving to a more complex migration that involves frontend and backend work. Since the website allows users to download files in different formats, the team has to migrate the file server to replicate the conversion functionality.

What was the team composition?

We had at least one developer throughout the project. DevBranch scaled the team up to four resources that worked concurrently on different projects.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

For the first website, the KPIs improved by more than 20%. We expect similar results for the other relaunch.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

They perform better than our previous remote development partners. The team speaks English well and accommodates us with how they use Slack, Trello, and Jira. They are responsive and professional in their approach.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We’re very impressed with their coding and overall quality. DevBranch has a deep understanding of the Drupal platform.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

We raised concerns over reporting issues early in the engagement and the team addressed them promptly. At this point, we’ve worked with them for more than one year and we are very satisfied with the relationship.