FAQ

Softamos specializes in custom software development. Unlike a typical corporate website or simple e-stores, each product that we develop is unique, varying from simple mobile apps costing $6k+ taking 2 months to launch, to enterprise financial solutions with artificial intelligence capabilities costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and taking years to develop. Our approach to estimating a new project is quite thorough. We need to collect and document all the requirements, pick the right technical solution, perform a feature by feature breakdown of the functionality and estimate every feature separately. We perform the initial analysis phase free of charge. As a result of this phase the clients receive:

• Technical proposal with software architecture and third party components
• Requirements documentation with UI/UX mockups
• Detailed feature by feature breakdown of the functionality and estimate

All intellectual property rights to the software that we develop belong to the client, royalty free, and the client may patent his solution. Softamos will provide all possible cooperation to patent the solution.

Yes absolutely. We will provide support and maintenance services and keep all knowledge to efficiently resume the project and develop new features if they are required. This is the benefit of using an outsourcing company versus an in house team. You can pause and resume your project with minimum overhead.

Yes, we have vast experience of taking over existing software projects from previous teams. Sometimes with no up-to-date source code and documentation. We have a specialized Project rescue service to save projects that are in complicated state. The typical process to take over a project:

1. As a first step conduct knowledge transfer from the existing team or documentation or code base.
2. Find out what are the issues with the existing solution that need to be solved and what new functionality needs to be developed.
3. Analyze the existing code quality and architecture.
4. Provide a detailed report on what parts are in a good state and can be efficiently reused, and what parts need to be refactored.
5. Test the existing application to find out what actually works and what needs to be fixed. Provide a testing report.
6. Formulate the next steps plan jointly with the client, taking into account the business goals to release new functionality and technical needs to reduce technical debt and improve the architecture.
7. Estimate agreed tasks and start working within agreed estimates.

We can speak of project success from a software development perspective – delivering a high quality product on time and within a planned budget, assuming you let us manage the development process. From this perspective, we believe that the most important factor is good requirements work:

• Use our business analysts to help you analyze the requirements and define functionality of the products screen by screen.
• Pick the right scope for the MVP. Don’t spend time and budget on unnecessary features.
• Document the requirements before estimating and coding. Remember that the devil is in detail.
• Iterate fast, show intermediate results to the potential uses, and incorporate their feedback.

Of course the requirements will change, but the sooner the change is made the less expensive it is. Of course there is also the business side of things: go to market strategy, competition analysis, product strategy, revenue projections. But this is not exactly our area of expertise. We’ll happily share our opinion and experience, but those are business decisions that need to be made by professionals in those areas.

1. Contact us and speak with our sales manager about your needs.
2. Sign a NDA.
3. We will analyze your requirements and organize a few workshops with our technical team to discuss the possible solutions.
4. We come back with a free proposal containing.
   • Specification of the requirements.
   • UI/UX mockups.
   • A Technical proposal with suggested architecture, technology stack and third party components.
   • Detailed feature by feature cost estimate.
5. You review our proposal, share your feedback, and the proposal is adjusted.
6. Sign the contract.
7. The project begins

You have nothing to worry about. Our process is organized so that the clients’ risks are minimized:

• All work processes are transparent. We are available for communication every day. We deliver the results every two weeks. The client pays only for what he gets. If we don’t deliver, you don’t pay.
• We store all the source codes and executables in clients’ accounts in major cloud providers, such as Atlassian Bitbucket for source code or Amazon Web Services for the hosting of the product. In case of any problems, you will have all the materials used in your product’s development. We document all requirements, architecture and code so it is easily transferable to another team if needed.
• We thoroughly control the quality of the code and the product on our end and provide the reports, checklists, code reviews and automatic code quality analysis to the clients
• All intellectual property belongs to you, protected by the laws of your country.
• We are open to any independent audit of the code and product quality. It is a relatively low cost measure that can be used at any time. Even before the project starts you may want to ask for an independent opinion on the suggested architecture and other materials.
• Our goal is to build long term relationships. We have clients who have stayed with us for over 6 years, since the company was founded. If we run into any temporary issues we’ll solve them as partners, giving priority to long term relationships over short term profit

After the project evaluation we provide a proposal with the cost of the development. It includes:

• planning;
• management (Project Manager is your primary point of contact during the development & delivery phases);
• analysis (Business Analyst works on the project on demand);
• design (if mentioned in the proposal you have received from us);
• development;
• QA;
• deployment.

All these services are included in the proposal. If the project requires any paid third-party integrations, the client pays for it additionally. Feel free to discuss the cost and services mentioned in the proposal with your project coordinator. We usually make advances to our clients.

For sure. You can discuss it either with your Project Coordinator or a Project Manager. We always have available resources to extend the team working on the project and speed up the development.

Yes. To save your money and time first we perform a code audit to define the issues to improve. After a careful evaluation we’ll prepare a proposal with the code parts to improve. We don’t refactor all the code, only the sensitive parts when the value is high to the project owner / stakeholder.

When the agreement is signed from both sides and Softamos has received an agreed prepayment we proceed with the team formation (1 week usually) and a kick off meeting. So it takes from 1 to 2 weeks max to start. Nothing special from you is required, only a positive mindset and desire to move forward.

We assign a Project Manager on every project we are working on. So he will be your primary point of contact. PM will send reports, hold demo calls, provide you with the project status, etc. He organises all the work on the project, monitors agreed deadlines, budget, workload, etc. From your side we need responsiveness and a desire to make a successful product.