Ideal Custom Software Development

Ideal utilizes a common sense "agile" approach to developing custom software that encompasses both business and development elements. Software cannot be built without considering the cost to a business and the effect on the business. Conversely, knowing how to properly gather information and produce a smart application is equally important.

The Ideal Approach is as follows:

Knowledge Acquisition
All businesses are different and even if Ideal has domain knowledge in your business, we still need to learn the nuances of your exact style of business. This process includes understanding the process you wish to automate and the goal you wish to attain from said automation.

Rapid Prototyping
Software is a visual tool and we've learned from experience that a projects success is highly dependent on the clients ability to visualize the final application. Ideal utilizes a Rapid Prototyping Agile Development methodology, wherein we develop all screens within the application first, so that the client can approve these before any code is written. The result is an application which does exactly what the client requires.

Building the Backend
The next step is building quality code behind the screens so that the application reponds quickly, is scalable and easy to maintain. During this process, we stage the application and constantly demonstrate functionality to the client as the application evolves. This is just one more step to ensure that expectations are met.

Testing
Ideal creates a comprehensive test plan that incorporates functional, data and user testing. Working with the client, we work to prove the application performs as designed and that all client expectations have been met. Fine tuning is often undertaken in this stage, as the application is exerienced in a full working version.

Implementation and Training
Once testing is complete, Ideal will deploy the application on the clients servers or, if desired, Ideal will manage the application on our servers. A full testing plan is developed and implemented per the clients needs.

Production and Maintenance
Ideal will keep the application running if required, including daily backups, server maintenance, OS maintenance, and feature upgrades to the application. The entire process of managing your software will be assumed by Ideal is desired, so that you can continue to run your business without the burden of added IT overhead.

Why Invest in Custom Software?

The challenge of software is to make businesses more profitable by improving productivity and by allowing users to perform tasks that would otherwise be either difficult or impossible.

Word processing software replaced the typewriter and although users were not enabled to necessarily type faster, the benefit of other features such as saving files, editing, printing mulitple copies and spell checking greatly increased productivity.

Your business is full of processes, such as order processing and scheduling, but there is nothing so generic about these processes as word processing. They are unique to your business or your way of doing business.

Good software will further enable your staff to complete these processes and as important, empower them to do more - not just in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality and capability.

Custom software is often the only solution to the unique processes within your business. You do things your way and off-the-shelf software knows nothing of those ways. So, typically, businesses like yours attempt to fit the proverbial round peg in a square hole, sometimes achieving better results than others.

This scenario rarely unfolks without aid from manual processes that support the off-the-shelf software you've chosen. Sure, the software was cheap, but employees and lost productivity are expensive.