We follow the Agile Scrum methodology throughout the entire Software Development Life Cycle. Scrum ensures a highly transparent and cooperative process; providing a better sense of project progress to our clients. It ensures that the development team are working on the most important features and delivering continuous product improvements. By refining the requirements and design over the entire SDLC, we ensure that the client’s expectations are fully met.

Development strategy

Discovery phase / Client workshops:

• This is the most important phase of the SDLC. In this phase,
• Our Business Analysts and Solution Architects will work alongside your team to establish a deep understanding of what your expectations of the project really are.
• The major deliverables and milestones will be determined in this phase.
• A high-level release plan will be generated to highlight the functionality the team is planning to deliver for the next several iterations. The idea here is to develop an effective blueprint: a story for your project.
• Any risks would be identified, and mitigation strategies would be put in place.
• We will define the roadmap for the project, and this is the opportunity for business stakeholders and technology providers to ensure we are all working with the same goals in mind.
• We will conduct client interviews and interactive workshops to capture all stakeholder requirements in order to shape the direction and scope of the project.

Planning phase:

• We capture the user requirements as user stories and build the product backlog
• Prioritise the user stories based on the priority set by the client
• Conduct a high-level design and modelling workshop to determine the architecture and technology stack
• Put in place an Infrastructure/hosting design and information architecture flow
• Document the test strategy and test plan

Sprint cycle:

Once the high-level requirements are in place, we employ an iterative development cycle where the requirements and design are refined within each Sprint.

Within each Sprint, we have:

• Detailed planning and detailed design
• Prototyping
• Build and deploy
• Testing

Based on our previous experiences, we believe it is critical that user-experience design runs for two (if not three) sprints ahead of development to make sure designs and functional requirements are clear before the start of the build. Our UX designers will work closely with you to drive design decisions and address design issues and ensure the UX designs are pragmatic.

We advocate a test-driven development methodology where at the start of each Sprint unit tests are defined and written to meet the acceptance criteria for the Sprint stories. This ensures that tests are written to meet the requirements (not the functioning code) and the defects are identified earlier and more efficiently.

Project Team

At Ilham Solutions, we have a team of highly skilled and experienced Business Analysts, Solution Architects, Technical Leads, iOS & Android developers, senior web developers, Process Leads and QA.

We have a DevOps team structure wherein the Product Development and Operations teams are part of a single agile delivery team.

Team capabilities:

Our delivery team has experience in the following key areas:

• Java/J2EE, .NET
• Mobile application development (iOS, Android, React Native)
• UI / UX
• Requirements gathering & Business analysis
• HTML5, CSS3, AngularJS, React
• Technical architecture and cloud infrastructure
• Distributed Agile delivery
• Service management, support and maintenance
• API development / Web services (RESTful and SOAP)
• WordPress, Drupal, Magento (and PHP) development