Quality matters

Quality in the first place is about the customer's perception and expectations of the system you develop.

At the beginning of a project, the customer in his mind has build up a vague image of how a web application can support his business. We would under estimate our customer's intelligence if we'd think we are able to build such a system based on a few meetings.

We believe the customer is the domain expert within his business and needs to actively participate during the project, to provide us with his knowledge about his domain. That way we get a better understanding of the required features. During the past years we learned that customer involvement does leverage quality.

Besides customer involvement, communication is one of the key success factors. By working at the customer's office at least one day a week we assure effective oral communication and focus on getting feedback from the customer. At our office we often work in pairs on programming tasks to share technical knowledge and continuously give each other feedback.

As development best practices we:

• use Subversion, a code versioning system to keep track of all changes,
• write unit tests,
  
• adhere to coding standards like Python's PEP-8,
  
• adhere to XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2 standards by W3C , if needed compensate Microsoft Internet Explorer bugs,
  
• registrate time per task to get feedback about our estimates.