Frequently Asked Questions

About Our Company

What's your company culture like?

We promote transparency and a healthy work/life balance. Our team is not encouraged to work more than 8 hours per day or on the weekends. We encourage continued education in which we provide extended learning courses to our team members and offer free gym memberships. We keep a fully stocked kitchen with healthy foods and offer free books for personal and professional growth. We have open communication channels where our team gets together to discuss interests outside of work, share technical knowledge amongst each other and we have annual team meetups in various parts of the world that include team building events - for example, taking a private plane around Mt. Everest in Nepal!

What makes AppEvolve different?

It starts with our team. All developers go through rigorous technical interviews, which include a proprietary coding test. Then they work on internal projects with a team called, “the sandbox” to assess how they communicate and work with a team. For each team member, it takes at the minimum of 3 weeks before they become a member of AppEvolve. We provide an environment that promotes well-being and maximizes productivity. All of our members inspire and motivate each other. This is in addition to our proven practices of building successful software, using knowledge, experience and past successes and failures accumulated over the years.

Projects

What’s a typical client for AppEvolve?
  • Non-technical business owners or key people with titles like: CEO, President, COO, Director of Operations, or sometimes Director of Technology or CTO
  • Technology-frustrated businesses – outgrown their current systems/process or need to improve what they already have
  • Mostly service-based businesses that see custom software as a competitive advantage
  • Established small and mid-sized businesses with anywhere from 10 to 800 employees
  • The companies we work with come from many different industries: real estate, construction, financial, transportation, pharmaceutical, entertainment, and many more.
Can you tell me the project cost?

Let’s compare software and building a house. If you go to a contractor and ask them how much it would cost for a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom house - there would be a lot of follow-up questions to get into the small details. And you would spend several hours picking out all the different colors and materials. It could take a few weeks to plan because you want everything to look the way you want it. That’s how it is with software planning. You can’t build a solid partnership without both parties being on the same page for expectations. If you are serious about the software build (or addition), you’ll want to do heavy planning, down to the smallest detail. This includes the database “blueprints” and design concepts. This is why we don’t accept projects who do not want to invest in the upfront planning. Our goal is to set you up for success by strictly following best practices for software development.

What languages do you specialize in?

Web: Django/Python, React, VueJS, Angular

Mobile: React Native, Flutter, iOS, Android

Do I own the code?

Yes, per our service agreement that gets signed at the beginning of a project, you will have full ownership of the code which has been paid for.

What are your testing procedures?

Testing is considered from the very beginning and planned for in the estimates delivered. We conduct code reviews on Pull Requests before they are merged into the codebase and unit tests are included with each Pull Request. Additionally, we have our QA team review before sending the new updates for your team to review internally.

Do you maintain projects after building them?

Yes! Software is like a living organism. It needs to be cared for long-term. Think of us as an extension to your business, who will both build and maintain the asset.

Can you augment existing teams?

All of our developers are carefully selected and capable of adapting to any existing team. We can assign one or more developers in either a full or part-time capacity to join your team and it's standard processes. Our developers are trained on all the latest standard development and communication tools.

Do you do fixed rates projects?

Not only do we do fixed-rate projects, but we prefer it. We require our Discovery, Design & Planning package before committing to any fixed project. It’s critical to set the expectations of delivery and cost before development starts.

What's a typical team structure look like?

A typical team consists of a project manager, solutions architect, designer and any number of developers needed to complete the project on time/budget. The solutions architect and designer are mostly involved during the first couple weeks of the project start. The front and back-end developers are involved full-time from start to finish and the project manager spends an average of 5 hours a week on keeping development and communication flowing smoothly.

Who hosts my application?

We will set up a hosting account on our AWS servers during development. When the application is ready to go-live, we will transfer the AWS account ownership to you. You will always have access/ownership to your code that’s been paid for.

What industries have you worked with?

We’ve had the pleasure of working with all types of industry. It keeps our team motivated and inspired to work within new industries. We have built software for the following industries: real estate, construction, pharmaceutical, finance, wellness, entertainment, hospitality, sports, beverages, security, transportation and more. In regards to industries we work in for the first time - we have found that having a fresh new perspective into an industry, combined with our background, has been beneficial to our clients.

What's an MVP?

An abbreviation for, “Minimum Viable Product.” To put it simply, it’s a barebones, usable piece of software that gets into the hands of your users within 60 to 90 days for early feedback. MVP can also be known as, “V1.” We highly encourage our clients to build their software in small increments. When you think of the core functionality of what your application is intended to do - we focus on building that piece first, so we can maximize your return on investment. Then we start adding in all the bells and whistles afterwards.

Who pays for bug fixes?

Custom software projects are ripe with risk, including: building the right product, funding and schedule risks, third-party integrations, and technical approaches that need to be proved out. Remember, you are paying your team to help you mitigate these risks, not to financially own them. Each sprint or release is not a guarantee of a finished, bug-free product.

However, we do have standards and best practices in place that encourage each team to do their best to build a high-quality product. We encourage our clients to embrace bugs, embrace risks, and know that we will do everything we can to address both. Your team will track bugs and work them into the schedule each week with other backlog items.

Our teams are smart and experienced; they do their best at predictably building your product. With each iteration, we’ll take what we’ve learned and quickly integrate new insights to keep quality high. Be aware that the financial risk of developing custom software is in your hands. A warranty doesn’t come from your development team, but it’s what you will offer to your customers and employees. Taking on the financial risk is why you have such a potentially significant financial upside.

Projects

Who will manage my project?

One of our on-site Project Managers, located in our Boise office, who are Certified SCRUM Masters and Certified Product Owners (at the minimum).

What management tools do you use?
  • Project Management: JIRA, Confluence, Notion, Slack
  • Development: Bitbucket, AWS, Slack
  • Design: Figma
What's your project management process?

Your dedicated project manager will be present from the start of your project until launch. During the time of working with us, you’ll receive (at the minimum) weekly (or bi-weekly) progress reports. These are generally done with a quick 15-30 min video call. For the software or management aficionados, we use the SCRUM methodology. You will have daily access to your project manager for anything you may need.

How do you do billing?

We do bi-weekly billing for the development that’s been performed the prior two weeks. Invoices are due in NET7 with ACH transfers and sent via Quickbooks. If you choose to pay by credit card, there will be a 3% fee on top of the invoice amount. For fixed-price, we require 25% of the total estimate up-front.

What are my responsibilities as a client?

Communication is key when it comes to development going smoothly. Our team does our best to clear all questions and remove blockers before development starts, but on occasion we need additional feedback from you, as the client. We ask that clients carefully understand the scope of work and timeline, be kind to our team (developers are not superhuman - focusing on 100s of lines of numbers and letters isn’t easy and takes time), respond to our inquiries promptly and don’t miss scheduled meetings. Building critical software for your company is a partnership and being involved will make it a happy and successful relationship.

If you’ve done a similar software, can you reuse the code for my project?

We get asked this a lot, and unfortunately the answer is no. We legally can’t and don’t use code that client’s pay for and apply it to another project to cut cost. However, we can utilize open source libraries and frameworks to help speed up some aspects of development (depending on the project, of course). We are also working on our own proprietary software modules to apply to clients projects to reduce cost in some areas. All of this would be worked out in the discovery phase.

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