DevEngineering

Please describe your organization.

We're a publishing company.

What is your position?

I am the director of engineering.

What business challenge were you trying to address with DevEngineering?

The work completed by DevEngineering was specifically for our advertising publication. They were responsible for developing and implementing an online resource center for our users, which would give them access to a wide range of value added content like case studies, white papers, and videos.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We've primarily used DevEngineering for their development services. We mainly handled the visual design, but we relied on them for developing the systems architecture and the user experience. They built our solution using Drupal.

We've mainly communicated with the project manager assigned to our project. There have been a number of developers in the background – possibly three or four at peak times.

How did you come to work with DevEngineering?

I used to run an online marketing agency. I found their company online six or seven years ago and hired them for development work within my company. When I started working at my current company, I brought DevEngineering in because of my experience with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've recently finished our resource center project. I don't think we're working on anything else at the moment. 

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I don't have specific metrics, but I can say that DevEngineering deliver their work within a timely fashion and meet up with defined expectations.

How did DevEngineering perform from a project management standpoint?

They're effective project managers. In most cases, they've delivered the work within time. We're usually the ones that hold up progress. DevEngineering use Redmine for project tracking and are an agile shop. On our side, we normally use JIRA, but have deferred to their system, for which they've set up accounts to accommodate our team.

What distinguishes DevEngineering from other providers?

There are many Drupal and open source developers available. What's unique about DevEngineering is that they understand the platform well and are adept Drupal architects. Their approach to building within the system conforms to standard best practices. There are many ways not to build Drupal systems well, especially if there is a lack of familiarity with the environment.

Is there anything DevEngineering could have improved or done differently?

As they grow their business, they should also grow their project management team. Their CEO [Dmitry Zhgenti], as is usually the case within small businesses, wears a number of hats, one of them being that of project manager. It's hard to run a business and run the projects within it at the same time.

Please describe your organization.

Hidden Springs Maple is a distributor of maple syrup and other Vermont products. It was founded by my brother-in-law, Peter Cooper-Ellis, whose family has been involved in maple syrup production since he was a kid. When he retired from Silicon Valley, he decided he wanted to engage in a web business. We have a brick-and-mortar store in Vermont as well as selling through a number of channels, including Amazon, which represents the majority of our business volume. The website that we operate is still a major part of our presence. We've been in business for four or five years, and are starting to see a profit.

What is your position?

I am in charge of website management, handling maintenance tasks for it and acting as an intermediary for the people in charge of shipping and for the site's developers.

What business challenge were you trying to address with DevEngineering?

We started out with a website built by a small company in San Francisco. It had been built using Zen Cart, which is an open source e-commerce platform. It worked reasonably well, but its UI [user interface] was somewhat basic from a customer perspective, and the company that built it wasn't equipped for ongoing maintenance and development. We made the decision to transition to a different developer.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

DevEngineering are Drupal experts and contributors to the Drupal open source project. Instead of trying to take over the existing Zen Cart website, they proposed porting it to Drupal, which would yield a more robust result. In so doing, they completely worked on the look and feel of the site while preserving basic functionalities. We have a commercial front end where customers can view products and reviews and make purchases. In the back-end, we manage the order cue, produce shipping labels, and so on.

Their team consisted of around five to six people, including graphics designers, QA [quality assurance] testers, and the developers themselves. We did interact with their team through email, but most of our communication was done through Dmitry Zhgenti, their CEO, via their project management system, which I believe was Redmine. It allowed me to submit issues, as either development stories that I needed to be worked or bugs that I found and which needed to be resolved. Their team broke my requests down into tasks and kept track of the time spent on each one. From my impression, they use a solid iterative development methodology.

We've gone through four major development pushes, including the porting stage and three improvement iterations, coupled with sporadic issue resolution and minor tweaks.

There was a period of about nine months from our initial talks to the cutover period of converting the entire database from Zen Cart to Drupal and bringing all of our product definitions over. DevEngineering did a straight port of our site, from an operational perspective. We didn't lose any of our data, and there was no need to recreate any configurations by hand.

How did you come to work with DevEngineering?

They were recommended to Peter by some of his contacts, so we got in touch them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them two and a half years ago.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We're certainly pleased with the growth of our business, and there has been an increase in traffic on the site.

How did DevEngineering perform from a project management standpoint?

Peter Cooper-Ellis was mostly in charge with overseeing the project, including its budget. He hasn't expressed any concerns. Compared to firms in the Bay area, DevEngineering are certainly affordable, and they're very professional and responsive. We've been very pleased with the quality of their work.

In terms of schedule, we've never set any firm dates with a few exceptions. We were mostly concerned with the upcoming busy season. Most of our business is done in November and December. As such, we always try to make necessary changes and test them out before that period. That's the closest we've come to having a strict schedule. I'm much more concerned with quality of work and getting what we need, than with creating a timetable. DevEngineering have been able to satisfy our standards.

What distinguishes DevEngineering from other providers?

I was pleasantly surprised by their responsiveness, given the time difference. It's not uncommon for issues to come up late in the day for us, possibly on a Friday afternoon. If there is any urgency to a matter, by and large, we're able to get speedy responses to items that show up on their end late at night. DevEngineering is conscious of needing to be responsive to their customers' requirements, and they make an effort to address the time difference through their work practices.