Maintain
Once the application goes live we can provide ongoing support via a maintenance agreement and/or ongoing active development agreements.
Maintenance Agreements
For applications with limited planned future development, a maintenance agreement is all that's required to keep the app running well. Maintenance agreements cover the following:
Error Monitoring & Bug Reporting
We use several third-party tools for error monitoring and bug reporting, including CodeClimate, Eslint, Sentry, and bugsnag. These tools alert us when something goes wrong, and help optimize performance.
Update Versions
Open source software languages are constantly updated by the open source community. Each update is called a "version". It's important to keep versions up-to-date, to ensure performance, security, etc. So all of our maintenance agreements include updating versions as a standard deliverable.
Performance Optimization
For applications that manage large amounts of data or which have large numbers of users, ongoing performance optimization may be required. This can include monitoring and optimizing servers, load testing and optimization, crash reporting and response, etc.
Update Integrations & Dependencies
Modern applications are built with a variety of third-party dependencies and API's, but these dependencies and API's can change over time. So an important part of our maintenance agreements is updating applications to ensure they continue integrate properly with third-party dependencies.
Ongoing Development
For clients who wish to continue adding features and making changes over time, an ongoing development agreement will be needed, in addition to a maintenance agreement. Ongoing development agreements include the following:
Product Roadmaps
We'll work with your team to create a robust product roadmap that outlines which new features will be built, and when. This helps prioritize features, plan budgets, etc.
Design New Features
After new features are added to the product roadmap, we'll complete a short design process to demonstrate the new feature and how it will operate within the existing application.
Develop New Features
Once design is complete, we'll estimate how much time will be required to develop the feature, then will add it to an upcoming sprint to be completed.
Operations
Wonder how we make this process work? Here’s the tactics and tools we use.
Collaboration
We create a Slack channel..everyone on your team and ours joins the channel. You have direct access to everyone on our team...not just the PM. Daily standups to review what was completed the previous day and what will be done that day. Find and overcome blockers. Weekly Client Check-In.
Hours Reporting
We track and report our billable time with unparallelled transparency. Our entire team tracks their time using Toggl which tracks time down to the second, and you are only billed for the time we are actually working on your project. No rounding hours, no block billing, and visibility into each time entry.
Other consultancies bill on a weekly or monthly basis, and don’t guarantee a set number of hours or try to hide it. They will say a PM is full time, but you don't really know how many hours they are putting in. This should be taken into account when comparing hourly rates or monthly rates.
Toggle entries are documented with the Jira identifier which allows you to see how much time is billed toward each jira story, each feature, each version, and the entire project.
We also provide daily reports showing the work logged in the previous day alongside month-to-date and year-to-date totals. Each month, a detailed report is attached to the invoice for your review.
Weekly Client Meetings
We conduct weekly client check-in meetings each week for each project. The purpose of this meeting is for the Project Manager to update the client on how things are going each week, and review things like sprint completion, hours worked vs the estimate, budget, timelines, and milestones.
