Services

DevelopmentArc strives to provide a wide range of services around a common goal of creating long-term value for our customers. A growing trend in the Web Application space is to undervalue the importance of user interface development, misunderstand technological choices, limit initial planning and underestimate architectural benefits when facing specific business problems. These undervalued aspects of solving business problems is causing clients to miss deadlines, while overspending valuable resources such as money and time.

Our goal is to help clients avoid these pit-falls by helping guide them to the right technology and to focus on the necessary planning to correctly implement those technologies. At DevelopmentArc, we pride ourselves on thinking long term as we plan and construct solutions for our clients needs with an end goal of providing efficient resolutions for today’s problems while creating solutions that can maintain and scale for the issue of tomorrow.

Application Architecture Planning

The architecture phase is one of the most important and yet overlooked processes when developing today's complex user interface driven web applications. DevelopmentArc recognizes the importance of such up front planning and specializes in helping clients roadmap and architect their solutions with the goal of saving valuable resources during the initial development and potentially future development. By focusing on well planned up-front efforts such as application architecture, clients can maintain project scopes and budgeted resources while creating a high quality solution.

Assisting the Design team (internal or 3rd party vendors) in understanding the benefits and limitations of the technologies employed.
Leverage existing frameworks, micro-architectures and other open source library’s to help provide a standard technological environment for developers.
Plan and architect up front or during each iteration of your development lifecycle, focusing on creating a foundation to build a solution that scales over time.
Create upfront coding standards and documentation requirements for your development team.

Framework and Product Implementation

DevelopmentArc sees application frameworks and micro-architectures as an important foundation for any project. This could be simply implementing an existing micro-architecture such as Adobe's Cairngorm or creating a custom framework to meet your on-going business need.

If you find yourself or your team rebuilding the same code for each project or copy and pasting code from one project to the next, a custom framework can help resolve these needs by saving your team development time and reduce the risk of having multiple different code bases performing the same functionality. At DevelopmentArc we have seen development teams wasting hundreds of hours repeating code from one application to the next without understanding the risk and the potential savings of time and money that implementing a custom Framework can provide.

DevelopmentArc can help build a framework solution for you. We believe that by analyzing the common problems that our clients solve from project to project and then constructing a framework that solves those problems has the potential to save hundreds of development man-hours today and in the future.

Code Analysis

Code Analysis is the process of reviewing existing projects for possible improvements to the overall code-base. The analysis process focuses on three main areas: overall code structure, potential coding errors including performance bottlenecks and recommendations for improvements to the code-base.

When providing code analysis, DevelopmentArc first reviews the overall structure. This process looks at how the code has been written and organized, verifying that it is structed and located in a meaningful way and that it meets general coding best practices. If coding standards have been adopted by the team, this review also verifies that the code conforms to the standard. If a standard has not been defined by the team then DevelopmentArc can help establish formal coding standards and best practices based upon our years of experience and industry standards.

During the analysis process, DevelopmentArc looks for potential coding errors that can cause issues such as performance bottlenecks or limitations as the code-base matures. This is an important step because during the release cycle overall performance tuning is put off to the end of the project. Unfortunately, the cause of performance bottlenecks and tricky intermittent issues are often hard to track down or are caused by the initial design (or lack thereof) of the code. Even the best developers make mistakes under the pressure of deadlines and having a 3rd party help troubleshoot the issues brings in a fresh pair of eyes that can help your team rapidly solve these kinds of issues.

Finally, DevelopmentArc is known for generating clear and precise documentation that explains our findings and recommendations to improve your code base. After performing a code analysis we deliver a review document that explains all our findings and provides recommendations for future improvements. Our goal is not only to solve your current needs but also to provide guidance on how your team can adopt established processes so that these issues will be less likely to occur in future projects.

Client Training

DevelopmentArc provides on-site custom training for adoption and development using Adobe® Flex® and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR^TM) for basic to expert level teams. Our vision is to provide a full insight into the benefits of Adobe® Flex® and AIR^TM, the technologies limitations and how best a team can leveraging it to build rich web-enabled applications. In our sessions we discuss not only the basics but also cover the value of architecture and how to leverage frameworks to streamline your development while building a solution that will last the test of time and the demand of your customers.

Along with on-site formal training, DevelopmentArc believes in providing clients with more than just a take away end-product. One of the common practices we see in the Web Application space is that a client hires a 3rd party vendor to create a solution for them. Often, the client has an internal development team that is responsible for maintaining and updating the product once it has been delivered, but the team had no input or experience helping develop the initial solution. This often means that the team must spend hours to weeks trying to understand what has been delivered to them or they may have to go back to the vendor to fix issues or add additional functionality.

DevelopmentArc is not your typical work-for-hire development house (in-fact we prefer not to consider ourselves a development house). We believe having our clients understand what we create for them is just as important as the end-product we deliver. DevelopmentArc prefers working directly with your technical staff which may already have skills in client–side and/or server-side development. By working directly with your team to create your application, DevelopmentArc provides “on the job” training. Having hands-on experience is the best way to learn a new technology or solution and guarantees that clients not only receive a great product, but has a staff that fully understands the product, the technologies, and the overall development process that helped create the final release.