It’s all about collaboration

Our primary goal is to engage in trusted partnerships around software talent – whether it be skilled Business Analysts, Front-end/Back-end/Full-stack Developers, or Functional/Automation QA Engineers.

With our base of talent in South Africa, we present the offshore alternative to the usual suspects in Eastern Europe, India and the Far East.

Our partnerships often take the shape of a flexible full-service, cross-functional team providing BA, Architecture, Development and QA talent (in a ratio suitable to your project needs), or as a collaborative, augmented team, providing the specific talent or skill missing around your table, whether it be a part or full-time Azure architect, or Automation QA Engineer.

Many software projects require more than just pairs of hands to perform a task – they require a partnership to interrogate and contribute to solutions on the table, proactively engage and take initiative in solving unexpected challenges. This kind of partnership requires IQ, EQ and true collaboration and sadly, barriers in language, culture and time-zone have a knack for eroding true collaboration.

The art of offshoring in software comes down to striking the balance between affordability (finding resource cheaper than local talent) and collaboration (finding talent who can truly engage as peers to your team). This is undoubtedly a difficult balance to strike, but this is where Haefele Software (and South African talent in general) presents a unique advantage – presenting an improved balance between affordability and collaboration, which most software projects demand, and deserve.

All of our projects work towards the Agile methodology, engaging clients in varying industries at varying degrees of Agile maturity. Our SCRUM literate teams have come to enjoy assisting our clients in that journey towards the more iterative process, higher release frequency, and achieving shorter/faster steps towards business value.

Along the way, we’ve worked with a number of projects aligned to shorter and sharper deliverable, whether it be an innovative proof-of-concept (POC), helping a client define their most cost-conscious minimum viable product (MVP) and/or ramping up their team to carry their MVP to Phase 1 product development.

As a consultancy, we continue to specialise in Microsoft & Azure to gain a depth and expertise to lead in this, our chosen stack. We maintain Microsoft Gold Partnership and strive for a consistency in quality talent amongst our analysts, full-stack developers and testers alike.

As the technology landscape ever changes, we do engage in adjacent technologies, frameworks and languages that add value to the Microsoft & Azure offering, whether that be in Cloud services (AWS, Google) and other language sets (e.g. TypeScript, Python), although balanced to not be at the expense of our depth in Microsoft & Azure.

We believe the trick to effective Agile is actively and constantly striking the balance of pragmatism, accountability and adoption.

In terms of pragmatism – following Agile shouldn’t be about forcing dogmatic ceremonies but on maximising team agility and responsiveness to the business. Not all businesses and teams are mature enough for full Agile but every team can iterate and improve on something towards the goal of improved agility and responsiveness. Try to fix one thing. Iterate. Repeat.

In terms of accountability – following Agile shouldn’t mean a drop in accountability at the expense of gained “agility”. Done right, Agile can provide necessary data points to improve estimation and everyone’s confidence in them, while holding the team more accountable, not less, at more regular intervals.

 In terms of adoption – when Agile is done right, the key client stakeholders, product owners and the broader team all need to understand the Agile basics, and engage regularly, even if lightly, in the cadence and unfolding outcome.

We build and refine high-performance teams/units of all kinds of shapes, crafted around the business outcome, technical needs, backlog maturity, ideal budget/burn rate and phasing, amongst a number of other factors.

However, common units look as follows:

• Scoping Week: A week comprising a partial Lead BA and partial Architect or Tech Lead.

• Tech Assessment Week: A week comprising a light-touch Lead BA and a full-time Architect or Tech Lead.

• QA Assessment Week: A week comprising a light-touch Lead BA, partial QA Functional Lead, and a partial QA Automation Lead.

• Design Week: A week comprising a partial Lead BA, full-time Designer, partial UX Lead, and a partial Creative Director.

• Small Dev Sprint (1-2 devs): A fortnight comprising a light-touch Lead BA, partial Intermediate BA, light-touch Architect, full-time Senior Developer, light-touch Lead QA, and a partial Junior QA.

• Medium Dev Sprint (2-4 devs): A fortnight comprising a light-touch Lead BA, full-time Intermediate BA, light-touch Architect, full-time Tech Lead, full-time Senior Developer, full-time Junior Developer, light-touch Lead QA, and a full-time Intermediate QA.

• Large Dev Sprint (4-6 devs): A fortnight comprising a light-touch Lead BA, full-time Senior BA, light-touch Architect, full-time Tech Lead, 2 full-time Senior Developers, 2 full-time Intermediate Developers, full-time Junior Developer, light-touch Lead QA, full-time Senior QA, and a full-time Junior QA.

• Automation QA Sprint: A fortnight comprising a light-touch Automation QA Lead, partial Senior Automation QA, and a full-time Intermediate Automation QA.

These teams represent a starting point for building an effective team, each shape suited for certain scenarios, recommended based on a number of factors; invariably each team evolves to a unique mix for the outcome and challenge facing each.

Our experienced Business Analysts, with exposure across industries, often work in tandem with client domain holders to provide structure and best practice artifacts to scope out your opportunities and needs. We explore off-the-shelf players, service vendors, and competitors in your space, all to assist your team in likely Feasibility assessments, Budget calculations and Business cases necessary to support your upcoming projects.

We engage with our clients to help clarify and capture their requirements, unpacking pain points in a series of workshops towards some key outcomes – often resulting in a subset of detailed backlog of user stories, high-fidelity wireframes, creative mockups, timing/phasing considerations, suggested architecture and a recommended team structure. In some cases, our Scoping exercises go as far as to develop POCs (proof-of-concepts) around more complex challenges to validate our technical recommendations.

When our clients are operating in an environment with a complex domain, or an environment with many moving and changing parts, it is difficult to pinpoint where to start or at least ensure the starting point carries the most value. Our team engages to conduct the necessary workshops in the shape of Event Storming to map out your current business processes, identify users, systems and pain points to help you make an informed decision on what to focus on and how to proceed.

In partnership with leading UI & UX product design teams, we engage to provide an end-to-end approach from researching your concept, market, and users through to design and prototyping through to solution architecture, development and  deployment.

As we’ve seen with some of our clients, not all software needs point to development resource – and sometimes the partnership is less about writing code, and more about improving the challenges upstream and downstream of that code and adding value in the broader software process.

When it calls for it, we enjoy getting involved alongside your team in technical consulting assignments, whether that be for a few weeks, a few months, or an ongoing addition to your cross-functional teams.

Our experienced senior team and Practice Leads, from covering industries from retail to construction, neuromarketing to financial services, always enjoy engaging in more strategic IT planning whether it be infrastructure, architecture, resourcing, or non-trivial technical decisions e.g. offshore vs. nearshore, outsource vs. inhouse, off-the-shelf vs. bespoke, rebuild vs. refactor and numerous other complexities that come with being a CTO today.

From our experience in augmenting numerous functional and dysfunctional teams, our SCRUM certified Business Analysts are well-equipped to engage in Agile, SCRUM and overall process coaching whether it be onshore, offshore or hybrid – not merely by sprouting best practice (which is easy), but by immersing within the team to affect change, embarking on iterative improvements one sprint at a time.

Downstream of code, a lot is often left to be desired. Our experienced Architects, Team, and QA Leads really enjoy the challenge of introducing team-changing improvements around QA strategy, release/pipeline strategy, branching strategy, and environment strategy – again, not merely by sprouting best practice, but by immersing within the team to affect change.

Reporting to provide insight and recommendations into the structure, security, performance, testability, extend-ability and suitability of a given architecture, from the coded solution and design patterns used, to 3^rd party components and release pipeline, to guide technical decision making around complex refactors, state of technical debt, and/or feasibility for rebuilds.

Given our experience in a variety of industries, types of software projects and their technical challenges, our clients occasionally lean on us for assistance in a slightly different shape – that of a Technical Audit, often to gain insight and recommendations from an independent, but technically knowledgeable party.

Our team engages to provide insight and recommendations into the structure, security, performance, testability, extend-ability and suitability of a given architecture, from the coded solution and design patterns used, to 3rd party components and release pipeline, to guide technical decision-making around complex refactors, state of technical debt, and/or feasibility for rebuilds.

Our team enjoys providing insight and recommendations into the health of a given team and their process, considering a number of facets from SCRUM/Agile maturity and adoption to branching strategy, from pull-request health to team skill gaps, from BA quality, story definition and estimation reliability to QA process and definition-of-done.

Our QA team, equipped in both Functional and Automation disciplines, enjoys engaging alongside BA, Dev & QA teams alike to unpack and improve all aspects of our client’s QA challenge often advancing their processes, tools, and  environments while improving maturity in test case management, regression packs and importantly assessing overall readiness and route to Automation.