Our development approach

Scrumconnect Consultants are experienced in working in multi-disciplined, multi-supplier teams.  They work closely with your Service managers/Product Owners,  to understand the user needs and then iteratively design and deliver a simple, easy to use service, aligned with the Government Digital Service Standard. We have provided multiple multi-disciplinary delivery teams, working collaboratively for the below services with the team members and stakeholders to deliver the platform to Digital by Default service standards for Alpha, Beta and Live services.

We have designed and received GDS accreditation for separate projects to date through Discovery/Alphas/Beta and beyond. Examples include:

DWP Carers

MOJ Make a Plea

GDS EIDAS

HOME OFFICE Syrian refugee programme

Syrian refugee programme

Our senior Agile consultants have deep experience of implementing using agile e.g. XP engineering practices, Scrum and Kanban.

Our approach includes the following:

Simplicity: We value software that contains no more complexity than it needs to do a good job. We build for what we need now, not what we think might be coming*. But we make choices that allow our software to rapidly change to meet the requirements that are coming.

Clean Code: We value software that’s easy to understand and maintain and is intention-revealing, as we know that this allows us to continue making changes with confidence, as we learn more about the problem.

Fast feedback: We value being able to find out whether a change has been successful in moments not days. It might be that unit tests have passed, or that we haven’t broken production, or that a customer is happy with what we’ve built.

Repeatability: We value the confidence and predictability that comes from removing manual tasks that introduce weird inconsistencies. We also want to spend time on activities that are more important than troubleshooting something that should have just worked.

Below are our Core principles and engineering practices that we follow:

Simple design: collective code ownership, pair programming, Refactoring, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and vertical slices.

Close collaboration: Collaborate before negotiating, share problems, retrospect frequently.  

Empowered teams: Teams are fully accountable for their deliverables and are involved in all decision-making.

Test driven: Tests are coded as requirements are defined, driving design, preventing gold-plating and creating comprehensive regression coverage. We “test early and often” to de-risk delivery and look to automate regression, performance, capacity and soak tests. Making Software. Better.

Continuous delivery: Automating the path to production from day one ensures that deployment is a repeatable, dependable process. Building and automatically testing after every code change means any issues are identified and fixed immediately.

Constant learning: Collaboration is the most efficient way to ensure the whole team is as productive as possible and knowledge is shared between all members. Refactoring across the code base reduces the cost of delivery of each feature and the total cost of ownership.

Our approach helps to address integration, dependencies and risk early. We capture actionable metrics to measure and manage progress towards meeting the agreed success measures and key performance indicators identified in the building and operation of your service, and the cost/benefit of service operation.

All our consultants have extensive experience of automated testing, continuous integration and delivery into at scale production environments. With all clients, we actively encourage the adoption of meaningful extensive test coverage, automated delivery and test techniques to reduce risk and safely increase delivery velocity. They also have extensive experience developing stateless architectures to ensure scalable implementations.

Our iterative delivery approach reflects our philosophy of ongoing learning.  

We work with key stakeholder to ensure that a constantly evolving product roadmap is maintained. Product evolution is influenced by and reviewed based on feedback from, our interactions with users and potential users of the service. We continuously run delivery process improvement activities. The development team regularly conducts retrospectives that identify process improvement opportunities.

We follow user-centred design and research processes, based on an understanding of user personas, behaviours and scenarios, on an ongoing basis to gain a greater understanding of user needs including assisted digital support. We aim to release new features and functionality to production as early as possible where required, often alongside the existing version of the service as AB-versions of functionality that can be used to test hypotheses with real users, who are funnelled to the appropriate version. These improvements may follow a reduced version of the whole process (discovery, alpha, beta and live) for smaller pieces of work as the service continues running.

Continuous delivery enables new functionality and improvements to be deployed to production as soon as they add value. We measure and respond to the impact of changes to agreed key performance indicators for the fully working and integrated Live service. We also continually test and evolve the assisted digital support for the service.

Our approach allows services to be tested and deployed independently within a Continuous Delivery environment, without impacting other production services. Teams are able to release multiple times each week across each of their digital services. We practice zero downtime deployments driven from Jenkins and can rollback using the same mechanism.