At Boost you become part of the team. Working together in short iterations, we deliver working solutions for your highest priority features. You get to test that these meet your customers’ needs, and then adjust your priorities for the work ahead.
As a result, at every stage you’re on top of costs, timeframes, quality and the value your web application will deliver your customers. Making use of our Agile expertise, we minimise risk and maximise your impact.
Read on to learn how you can quickly and cost-effectively develop a secure, stable, scalable, easy-to-maintain web application that your customers will love to use.
I hate IT projects — my job is to manage risk. In Agile though, you can manage risk by breaking work into short sprints. At the end of each sprint, you’ve actually got something. You feel integrated within your project.
Depending on what your users will want to do, it may not be a web application that you need.
Here are a few alternatives, and some guidance on when to go with them:
There’s no point developing a web application when there’s an off-the-shelf solution that meets your needs. If you want to solve a common business problem, the odds are there’s an off-the-shelf solution out there for you.
Think of it as view vs. do. If your users will mainly view things, build a website. If they’ll do things, develop a web application.
Mobile apps are installed on the device, giving them access to inbuilt features like cameras and location. Web applications run in the device’s web browser. Progressive web applications blur this distinction, because they can also use inbuilt mobile features.
Mobile apps tend to run faster and offer more features. Web applications are quicker to develop and don’t need app store approval to launch. Is your priority speed of delivery or speed of performance?
Desktop applications are installed on the user’s machine, rather than running in their web browser. More powerful web browsers mean that many user and business requirements can be met with a web application these days
Customer collaboration is at the heart of the Agile ethos, and we are New Zealand’s leading exponents of Agile project management, with 14 years experience running successful Agile projects. More than that, collaboration drives everything we do as a company. We have a single, explicit business purpose:
As a team, we only choose projects that will have a positive and lasting impact. Because the team only works on projects that excite them, they bring passion and energy to their projects.
When you work with Boost, you become part of the team.
Ideally, you’ll be able to join us here in our Wellington studio. Manaakitanga is one of Boost’s values, so you’re always welcome. If you can’t make it to Boost, we make it easy for you to join by video conference.
It sounds a bit corny, but you do have that perception that you are an integral part of their business
We’re the only Wellington web application development company with the Agile expertise to provide ICAgile and PMI-certified Agile training to our development clients, and to other organisations.
As well as getting free Agile training, you’ll have a dedicated Agile coach to help get the most from the process.
We’ll kick-off your project with a free discovery workshop. This is a chance to collaborate with key stakeholders, with customers, and with the project team, in order to:
When you’re developing a web application, the main risks are that you’ll go over time, over budget, build a buggy app, or build one that doesn’t give your users what they need.
Throughout each iteration you work closely with the team, answering questions, checking work, clarifying priorities and requirements. Work in progress is tracked each day. At the end of each iteration, we deliver working solutions for your top priority features, which you then get to test. Because you can track progress, costs, quality and how well you’re meeting user needs, you stay on top of these risks at all times.
This process relies on four main techniques:
Boost’s process means I agree to features as they are built instead of taking delivery at the end of the project, only to find I’m stuck with bits that don’t work as I want.
There’s an art to combining web application design and development in an Agile project. The key is constant collaboration between designers, developers and you, the client. Here’s how we do it.
Our designers and developers work closely with you to collaboratively build lo-fi working wireframes. These are regularly user tested. Once the bulk of the features are in place we complete a UX review, taking a step back to consider the big picture. This and the user testing guides our graphic design phase, during which we create the cohesive brand and user experience.
Because we don’t spend time implementing hi-fi designs early on — when they are likely to change — we save you time and money.
The focus on usability throughout the process means you get a web application that is:
Seeing the Boost team work together was really cool — I've never seen web design work so well with development.
Boost won the Wellington Team Gold Award for the way we empower our team to deliver a bigger impact for our clients. We’re also the only Wellington web application development company to be WorldBlu-certified as a freedom-centred workplace.
For our clients, this means you get a committed team, who are given the time and tools to constantly build their expertise. Web application development is a rapidly evolving field, so you need a team who are up with the play.
We specifically recruit team players and focus on soft skills, so you work with people who are skilled at the art of collaboration.
Our developers build, test and release software as self-contained DevOps teams, using Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration. All our developers do both front-end and back-end development. This means there is no time-consuming handover between teams. As a result, we release reliable, tested, working software early and often throughout the duration of a project.
Based on your requirements, we provide scalable, resilient and secure infrastructure to run your web application.
Most of our projects run in AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud infrastructure, with ongoing monitoring to ensure your applications deliver cost-effective performance. If you have multiple applications, we run these in our self-managed Kubernetes cluster.
We deliver risk-based agile security assurance based on Open Web Application Security Project best practices and New Zealand Information Security Manual technical security standards.
Most of our web application development projects use Application Programming Interfaces — either ones we build or ones we integrate. We developed the DigitalNZ API, one of the first examples in the world of an API used to aggregate a nation’s digital content and considered the New Zealand government’s first RESTful and public API.
We specifically chose the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications because it gives our clients the best balance of rapid development and robust engineering.
Using Rails lets us rapidly prototype working solutions, so we can deliver more value, sooner. As a mature open-source platform, Ruby on Rails is stable, secure and well-maintained, and gives you a solid but flexible base on which to build your app.
We’ve used Rails since 2006 and our developers have over 100 Rails applications under their belts.
Learn more about why we use Ruby on Rails.
