Database City is an agile company. While extremely capable, we are small enough to be almost anything you need us to be. Over our 15-year history we've established contacts in many technical, marketing, and media areas, and we can respond to business challenges with software solutions, ongoing support, and even emergency responsiveness. We do consulting, development management, reworking or upgrading of sites and applications, but what we do primarily is to create online applications through successful development projects. Repeat business is the key to our longevity, and good working relationships are the key to that.
Most projects follow the steps outlined here in general. You do have to pick up the phone and call us first!
First we talk with you, listening intently to the details of your needs. Then we capture both these needs and the results of our more technical internal planning and discussions into a document called a Requirements Outline. This Requirements Outline defines the project in some detail and becomes Exhibit A of our future Software Development Agreement. This document is also a guide for the programmers, and is useful as documentation of the software. Generally, we try to get our interests in complete alignment, making for a good relationship. We plan save you money wherever we can.
We study the tasks involved in meeting the requirements of the project, estimate the man-hours it will take, and hopefully determine our fixed-price quote for the project. This number gets included in the proposal, including all terms. With us, you completely own the resulting software, there is nothing proprietary that ties you to Database City forever. We seek to take as much uncertainty out of the project as possible. This is good for both of us. Sometimes third-party or open-source software is included and we will tell you about that. Sometimes we need to start before we can know all details of the project. In this case we will quote an hourly rate and do a time and expenses type of agreement.
Once initiated, the development environment is set up, progress milestones are noted and the project moves toward completion in accord with the plan. Our projects are typically done using PHP, which is a common scripting language, the Zend framework, and a database engine such as MySQL, SQL Server, PostgresSQL, Oracle, or DB2. We keep projects organized using a secure, backed up code repository and project management system.
Database City usually requests half of the agreed upon development fee up front, and half upon substantial completion. Larger projects may use several milestones and payment points.