Consulting

We know software engineering, it’s in our blood. We were there writing machine language and assembly code when the personal computer was invented; we helped build the world wide web before it was a year old; and we’ve just plain designed and built lots of cool stuff.

When you bring us into your business, we hit the ground running with over 40 years of software engineering experience, in too many domains to mention. This contributes to an innate understanding of most software technologies and associated domains.

We specialise in the following services:

• Mentoring engineering teams
  Improve the technical skills and group dynamic of junior developers and old hands alike. Find the skill gaps and people problems that are holding your team back and affecting your critical development projects.
• Engineering process improvement
  Project teams rarely see the wood for the trees. Let us improve your processes to limit risk, improve quality, and decrease project delivery times. We are specialists in Agile and Lean, including XP and Scrum, and understand the problems involved with implementing new processes or revitalising old ones.
• Software architecture
  We just know how to build stuff. Let us work with your team to solve the difficult technical problems in your project.
• Reverse engineering
  It’s a dark art, but its not magic. From our vast engineering experience, we can really accelerate reverse engineering projects by iteratively identifying common development patterns, tell tale code patterns that give away a developer’s thought processes and experience level. Reverse engineering isn’t just about trying to understand undocumented code, it’s about getting into the mind of the original developer.
• Refactoring
  Most developers prefer new development and writing code from scratch, and won’t fully apply themselves to the bigger problems of non-functional requirements and code maintenance, including technical debt, patching, bug fixing, refactoring and performance tuning. We bring a wealth of knowledge in these domains, and the recognition of their importance. Invention is the easy bit, invention’s legacy is the more critical bit.
• Project management, including Agile & Lean methodologies
  Over 80% of software projects run over schedule or just don’t work. We have a track record of delivering under time, with varying methodologies, particularly Agile and Lean. Project management doesn’t have to be about wielding a big stick, death marches and finding who is to blame in the end of project review.