New Branch Ltd

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Chief Software Officer of a biotechnology research company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

The company develops and commercializes a benchtop kit for single-cell sample preparation and a cloud-based companion software for intuitive single-cell data analysis dedicated to both biologists and bioinformaticians.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire New Branch Ltd to accomplish?

• Accelerate software development time with limites resources and budget
• Deliver a sustainable software product of high quality
• Work as one team with external and internal developers in an agile way

SOLUTION

How did you find New Branch Ltd?

Referral

Why did you select New Branch Ltd over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from New Branch Ltd were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The scope of the work consisted in supporting the internal software R&D team of the company to design, implement and maintain both the front-end and the back-end part of the single-cell data analysis platform, and to develop its cloud architecture in AWS.

The work was organized in sprints of 2 weeks, with the following key deliverables:

• Delivery of PoC in December 2021
• Delivery of first Beta version in March 2022
• Delivery of first Release version v1.2 in April 2022 for commercial launch
• Delivery of Gen 2 version in November 2022
• Delivery of Gen 3 version in April 2023
• Delivery of Gen 4 version in October 2023

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Fast time to market
• Robust and sustainable code
• Satisfaction of internal team members working with New Branch team members
• High customer satisfaction
• Regular relases of new version with high added-avlue features

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

New Branch team worked with us in SCRUM mode with accurate workload estimation and high pro-activity. They reported the working hours every month. They showed high productivity and responsiveness.

What was your primary form of communication with New Branch Ltd?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

What I found most impressive was the ability of New Branch team to adapt to a very specific data analysis field requiring deep domain knowledge (the world of single-cell data analysis), to challenge the technological choices and the feature priorities in a constructive and pragmatic way, and to ensure  very intuitive user experience in the developed platform. It was a real pleasure for us to work with them.

Are there any areas for improvement or something New Branch Ltd could have done differently?

I don't think we should have done something differently. An area for improvement could be to increase code coverage, but we had to found a good compromize in order to deliver the product on time.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of Scailyte

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Scailyte discovers biomarkers and designs companion diagnostics for immuno-oncology and cell therapies by applying AI for unbiased, innovative, sensitive, and integrative multiomics data analysis.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire New Branch Ltd to accomplish?

• To build the initial version of our software platform from the ground up
• To handle the application development, except our core data analysis algorithms
• Acquire Scala and React technology capabilities.

SOLUTION

How did you find New Branch Ltd?

Referral

Why did you select New Branch Ltd over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from New Branch Ltd were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We wanted to build a data analysis platform so that users could leverage our AI/ML algorithms to analyze their datasets. The New Branch team handled all aspects of the web application development and the corresponding server components. The following is a list of the most critical modules they developed: 

• Complex data flow for preparing analysis tasks runs where users can upload large data set files, align their data, and select from many parameter options for the different analyses. 
• A visualization module with many interactive plots, charts, filtering, and coloring options for analyzing data and results. 
• Features for running and managing long-running analysis processes that might take several hours to complete. 
• User registration and multi-factor authentication.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

They implemented the application functionality specified in our requirements with a very high-quality standard.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They worked together with our team of engineers and experts. They had meetings sync meetings every day and planning and review meetings at the end of every two weeks. During these meetings, they shared progress and new information, which allowed us to adjust our plans. They were very responsive to new requirements and changes coming from our end.

What was your primary form of communication with New Branch Ltd?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Given that we hired another company to extend our team, I was not expecting that the collaboration would be so smooth and fruitful. During this long-term project, we had a very open, transparent, and respectful relationship. Also, despite their lack of experience in our field, they learned quickly and managed to collaborate with our experts to deliver what was requested.

Are there any areas for improvement or something New Branch Ltd could have done differently?

We were very happy with the collaboration, so nothing to add here

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of hacker.works

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We build cutting-edge bespoke digital products (web apps and platforms) and help start-ups get from idea to revenue by applying agile and lean methodologies and software engineering best practices.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire New Branch Ltd to accomplish?

• To extend our team with exceptional development capabilities that meet our high standards of technological excellence and customer service.
• To bring strong expertise in Scala, Java, and React technologies.
• To own the full-stack development for three different projects and consult our clients.

SOLUTION

How did you find New Branch Ltd?

We have worked with the founder before

Why did you select New Branch Ltd over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from New Branch Ltd were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We worked with New Branch engineers on three projects for different startup companies: 

• Big data processing and visualization platforms. 
• Video news delivery application. 
• Custom CMS for startup scouting and management. 

The New Branch led the development process in all cases by designing the software architecture and implementing complex features. The features that resulted from this process were high quality, written using readable, well-documented source code, and tested through unit, integration, and end-to-end tests. 

They also helped our clients clarify their requirements and suggested alternative solutions that saved time and money. In some cases, they helped with the project and backlog management in JIRA. NB handled the initial project setup with different technologies and tools, configured the CI/CD pipelines, and set up cloud infrastructure.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We delivered around 50 two-week-long sprints for a period of 30 months. They have contributed around 750 man-days of work to our projects. All of our three clients gave positive feedback about their results.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Our retrospective meetings were productive, and the suggested adjustments resulted in measurable improvements. In most cases, items were delivered on time with high quality. In the rare instances when items were late, there was an adequate reason for the delay, such as a change in scope, unpredictable edge cases, unpredictable technology challenges, etc. They were good at handling these fires.

What was your primary form of communication with New Branch Ltd?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Excellent cultural fit if you share agile values and a pragmatic mindset. New Branch Ltd engineers deeply cared for quality based on their understanding of our needs, combined with impressive execution speed. They have rare technological expertise in the Scala ecosystem.

Are there any areas for improvement or something New Branch Ltd could have done differently?

Nothing comes to mind at the moment.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Expert Systems Engineer of Astea Solutions

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Astea Solutions designs and builds custom software solutions and provides consultancy services to clients in a variety of domains such as healthcare, interactive learning, risk management, financial services, e-commerce, etc.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire New Branch Ltd to accomplish?

• New features implementation for an existing web & mobile finance application

SOLUTION

How did you find New Branch Ltd?

Referral

Why did you select New Branch Ltd over others?

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from New Branch Ltd were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

New Branch developers were in charge of the enhancement of a web and mobile application that provides comparisons between different Living Benefit Riders and Fixed Index Annuities. The application was originally developed by our company, and when the client came back with new requests, we turned to the New Branch both for the implementation of the new features and for much-needed updates to key parts of the application. 

Essentially, as part of several concerted efforts within the overall timeline they: 

1. Implemented a new tool for benefit riders comparison 
2. Enhanced an existing tool by adding new functionality 
3. Updated the way the mobile applications were built to accommodate changes to the AppStore submission process 
4. Updated libraries and frameworks to keep the project on track with the latest versions

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• The planned new application features and updates were provided to the client and became available to end users in a timely manner 
• The application received a much needed update for major technologies and libraries, which allowed future updates to the mobile application

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

New Branch was flexible enough to accommodate certain changes in the clients original requirements. At the same time the team was able to provide reliable estimates so that the client was aware of the impact of the modifications to the overall timeline. In the end the items were delivered in line with the client’s expectations

What was your primary form of communication with New Branch Ltd?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Some parts of the codebase were not very well documented and were tricky to work with. Therefore we had planned more time and budget with our client. I was pleasantly surprised to see the New Branch’s team execute the originally planned tasks faster than anticipated. This allowed us to add more improvements to the project without changing the budget, which exceeded the client’s expectations.

Are there any areas for improvement or something New Branch Ltd could have done differently?

They performed excellently on the project and I have not observed any particular area that requires improvement.