What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
They’ve built our frontend the right way, and it's working. We've engaged many people around the globe to help us do this and Devsar has been our most successful development partner. It's a pleasure working with them.
How did Devsar perform from a project management standpoint?
Our designers provide overall daily project management. They provide their own project managers as well, it's part of the package, so there’s no extra fee, which is wonderful. Our weekly sprint meeting includes their developers, our developers, our QA people, and project managers from both sides. The project managers talk to each other, manage details, and align the teams. They’re very professional and communicate well. It takes the management burden off of the developers so they can focus on development.
They have a lot of broad experience within their team that they manage flexibly. They’re not rigid about what we’ve contracted for. If we hit a challenge that requires a different skill set, they will pull in a relevant expert from their team. It helps us achieve our goals. When something looks really complicated, we work on it together via paired programming. That way we come up with solutions together and they don’t spend a lot of time going down the wrong path.
It has been a nice added bonus that they are located in Buenos Aires, only a one-hour difference from us in New York. This has been much more manageable than the larger time-zone differences we’ve experienced with other partners. The increased overlap of working hours provided a lot more opportunity for interaction resulting in much better productivity.
What did you find most impressive about them?
Past partners could often do a fine job delivering what was asked, but their implementation only took into account the current objective. We have a lot of in-house development experience and want the software being written to not only address the current tasks but be implemented in a way that can leverage earlier work from other parts of the system and result in code that is itself can be reused when possible. Finding common architectural solutions that can be applied across the larger system results in cleaner, more maintainable code that can be implemented in a faster and more reliable way. What works so well for us with Devsar is that they're interactive. They are open to discussion and not afraid to contact us to discuss if there is a better way to solve a problem. They’re able to give us constructive feedback. As a result, they don’t just deliver something that works, they deliver something that works well and is architected with considerations for the larger system. Consequently, overall development costs go down and maintainability goes up through proper development of re-usable components.
For example, they were willing and able to use a component across all of the different parts of our app that allows you to save the way you've currently configured any “page". They were initially going to apply a one-off approach, not aware that there was a plan to use similar functionality on all “pages”. However, because of the interactive nature of our work together, we were able to identify this as an opportunity for improved generalized design. They went back and developed a proposal for me and then accomplished it. We got exactly what we needed. Their willingness and ability to work with us and adapt is an incredibly successful part of our relationship.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I have no complaints.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
They're very responsive, but don’t underestimate the need for good communication. Don't assume that your development process is theirs. Tell them not just what you want but what kind of relationship you want. They’ll be receptive and very good at adapting to that—but make sure you have that conversation.
The project is progressing well, with the team having finished the first of its four development phases. Devsar has proved themselves to be reliable and responsive partners, finding quick solutions to any issues and offering excellent customer service.