Development best practice consulting

Over recent years Kynetix have been responsible for delivering some of the largest Microsoft .NET projects in the UK. During this time we have been using a kaizen-style approach to implementing best practice in the development environment.

We've continually refined our processes to ensure that we could manage the development and delivery of these large-scale projects. As an ongoing task our development teams are continually looking at ways to improve the whole development process.

We've realised that the experience we have with implementing best practice in a .NET environment would be invaluable to other organisations trying to improve their development processes.

Regardless of the size of your projects there are many things you can do to improve your development processes and ensure you deliver the best software possible in the shortest timeframes. 

Our services

We offer a Software Development Best Practice consulting service that advises on, and provides leadership on, implementing best practice in corporate development environments using Microsoft .NET. In addition, these practices will help you become a more Agile organisation without binding you to any specific Agile method.

The services are tailor-made to each client's requirements and are designed to embrace the current environment and infrastructure whilst implementing new practices and procedures that will significantly improve the quality and speed of development.

What we do

Our stated goal is to help you build great software development teams.

There are many practices that will help you create great development teams. Most likely you will already be doing some of them. If so, then great.  But it's likely you won't be doing all of them. If this is the case then there's an opportunity to raise the stakes and drive your teams to greatness.

We are software development change agents. We work with your team(s) to implement new practices and refine existing ones to ensure that you get better quality deliverables in less time.

The principles and practices we implement are agnostic to whatever development method you use. We've refined these practices over many years using Agile development methods but most of these are valid for any method.

These are some of the principles and practices, and the disciplines and habits that distinguish the best 10% of software professionals from the rest.

• Improve your hiring process. We'll help you implement a set of tests that will ensure that you get the right people on board. It's a well known fact that great developers are many times more productive than average developers so you need to be sure that you are hiring great developers.
• Have Extensive Coding Standards. Great teams work in a consistent and predictable manner and understand that working to an agreed set of standards benefits everybody in the team. Therefore a pre-requisite for building great teams is that you must have a set of corporate coding standards that is issued to everybody and is then policed (see Code Inspections section). We'll help you build/enhance your own set of standards to suit your corporate needs.
• Peer code inspections to reinforce good practice.  Code inspections protect the team by ensuring all developers are following the corporate standards. They help find bugs early in the process when they are both easier and cheaper to fix. They help spread knowledge amongst the team - in particular younger developers get to learn from the senior people on the team. They also help prevent teams from repeating the same mistakes. We'll guide you on running effective code inspections and help you implement a set of practices that will ensure the inspections are run effectively.
• Source Code Management. We'll ensure that you have a robust code management system in place. Our preferred platform is Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS). We'll help you set this up and configure it for your environment. We'll also help you set up the reporting so that you can get regular reports on your projects.
• Issue Tracking repository.  We'll examine how you log and manage issues to ensure that the process is effective and joined up with the development environment. If you run TFS then we can help you implement issue tracking within TFS and Visual Studio. 
• Unit Testing  is a sign of a mature development team. Great developers not only develop good code but they provide evidence that the code is solid. They do this by implementing Unit Tests in their code. We'll help you implement Unit Testing in your development teams and provide guidance on getting this established as a standard practice within your organisation.
• Continuous Integration  (CI) is the practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually daily. It exposes the difficulty of integration and helps development teams to better predict when a project will be done as they won't have an integration black hole at the end of the project. If you're not using CI then we'll help you set up the environment for this and coach your developers on how to effectively use it.
•  Retrospectives all the way through a project.  Great teams continually want to get better. They strive to find ways to become more efficient. They look for ways to improve their processes and eliminate waste. They pride themselves on becoming the best developers they can be. Retrospectives, enable teams to self improve even during the course of a project. We'll help you implement a process for retrospectives to ensure they are run correctly (e.g. no blaming or retribution). We can also facilitate retrospectives for you as a neutral party. 
• Morning stand-ups  are a great way to keep teams communicating and for larger projects it helps keep the team on the same wavelength and ensures that different parts of the team don't go dark.  We'll help you implement morning stand-ups, ensuring that they are kept brief and to the point. We'll also help you implement project boards as a means of keeping people focussed on the tasks at hand.
• A commitment to Best Practice. Do you have a plan to ensure that your development teams constantly find ways to improve or do you just accept that it's OK for them to turn up for work and develop as they've always done? Do you have a supportive environment that encourages people to improve? What internal processes have you got that ensures that your teams are constantly seeking to implement best practices? Are your training plans focussed on improvement and not just education? Let us help you start a rolling commitment to best practice so that your development teams achieve their true potential.
• And many more ideas.  These are just some of the ways that we can help you improve your software development processes.