ISS Art Blog

Challenges of developing your own software product: ISS Art team experience

Jul 16 2015

As some you might know already, the primary activity of our company is custom software development. We work in international market primarily, and during our professional life we’ve faced a need to monitor our team’s performance as well as to provide transparent reporting to our customers (you can read more about these challenges here). Although there are a lot of ready time tracking solutions aimed to help to deal with these issues, we have decided to build our own system – the one that would meet our company’s need to the fullest. We’ve named it CrISStal Eye.
Read More

Custom SaaS accounting application development

Jul 07 2015

The world of custom application development has evolved so much over the years, and with the ever-changing technology, custom applications are becoming more spectacular as time goes on. One of the most recent popular types of application development includes Software as a Service (SaaS), especially when partnered with various accounting applications.

Jun 25 2015

In my previous post I told you about Scrum advantages. But there are a lot of issues when people try to use Scrum on their projects. Scrum is ideal when a company is developing a product for itself, when there are no outsourcing, deadlines and distributed teams. But when you try to use Scrum with outsourced development, things are getting more and more complicated. So, the Project Manager should keep in mind that there might be some false hopes of Scrum (this topic is covered here).

I have a half dozen projects in my portfolio, and today I will share my experience of Scrum in real life with you.
Read More

Time tracking challenges in software development outsourcing

Jun 18 2015

You already know that offshore software development brings the following benefits:

Cost reduction when working with competitive labor markets;
Unlimited access to highly specialized professionals;
Maximizing the efficiency of time zone differences – less production down time.

Together with that, it brings certain challenges you should be aware of:

The need for constant management and control (in particular, time and budget);
Cultural differences (which were covered in one of our previous articles);
Lack of face-to-face contact.

Let’s talk about control in more depth.
Read More

Scrum development as a way of maximizing business value

Jun 09 2015

Classic waterfall software development approach originates in the manufacturing industry and is sequential by its nature. Phases follow one after another: requirements gathering, design, implementation, test, deploy. But currently this process doesn’t meet the needs of modern business. A medium sized project can last for a year, larger projects can take even more time to be completed. In a year original detailed functional requirements are often completely outdated. You can get a product that you don’t need.

Jun 02 2015

We’ve already covered various aspects of software development process so far: how to choose a provider, which IP issues to consider, how to motivate your team, what challenges to be aware of when working on international scale… But how to make sure that the whole team is actually working? What if the majority of time is actually spent on non-project related activities (i.e. Facebook, chats with friends, etc.)?

e learning systems keyboard and shift key

May 28 2015

Technology has come a long way when it comes to being a productive tool for teaching. In fact, E-learning has made a huge impact on training within organizations all over the world, and this type of teaching continues to evolve. Whether it be for the workplace or school, it is a great way to disseminate information to a particular group. The E-learning market is set to make a large impact with an estimated revenue of approximately $51.5 billion by 2016, which is a projected 7.6% growth.

May 21 2015

This article covers technical details of PHP driven configuration described in a previous article. There are a lot of stones under the water that can drive you crazy when you work with PHP templating engine. I will tell you how to work around some of them. We’ll discuss how to:

Implement script inclusion methods
Prevent vision of context’s private members
Implement graceful error handling
Implement state stack for nested scripts inclusion
Include scripts by relative path
Output JSON arrays/objects in for-loops
Prevent security issues

May 13 2015

As your software development process is getting closer to finish, your product promotion is going to become your primary focus.

What to consider when starting promotion

Identify your target audience

First and foremost, you need to understand whose needs your product is aimed to satisfy – you need to know your target audience. For example, if your newly developed project is an E-learning system, your potential customers will be students and teachers most likely. If it is a time-tracking system, it will be interesting for startup owners, heads of IT departments and businessman working with remote employees (software development teams, for example).

Apr 30 2015

Motivating an offshore team is another important aspect of software development outsourcing. Being among the Best Offshore Software Development Companies, we can say that to get a better understanding of motivation aspect, it’s worth to look at it from two different angles – from a perspective of a customer and from a perspective of a Project Manager (PM) of this offshore team.

Challenges of developing your own software product: ISS Art team experience

Custom SaaS accounting application development

Some issues with Scrum adoptions

Time tracking challenges in software development outsourcing

Scrum development as a way of maximizing business value

Time tracking systems overview

The right E-learning solutions for your business or organization

A great feature of PHP – Cookbook for context implementation

How to promote your software product

What to consider when starting promotion

Identify your target audience

Motivating an offshore team

Contact us

Categories