At this stage the Customer provides information on the volumes of planned work, and if necessary we conclude non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
All information should be as detailed as possible delivered in a structured form (specification or terms of reference). If you do not have such a document, we can draft it for free.
Terms of Reference is the source document for software design. The terms of reference articulates the main purpose of the software under development, its technical characteristics, quality indicators and technical and economic requirements, the instruction to perform the necessary stages of documentation drafting (design, technological, software, etc.) and its composition as well as special requirements.
The Terms of Reference is a legal document being an annex that is included in the contract between the customer and the contractor. It is the basis of this contact: it determines the procedure and conditions of work including the purpose, objectives, principles, expected results and terms of implementation. There should be objective criteria by which it is possible to determine whether a particular item of work is being done or not. All changes, additions and clarifications of the formulations of the terms of reference are necessarily coordinated with and approved by the customer. This is also necessary due to the fact that in case of discovering inaccuracies in the process of solving the design problem or inaccuracy of the initial data, it becomes important to determine the degree of fault of each of the parties involved in the product developing, distribution of losses incurred in connection with this. The Terms of Reference as a term in the field of information technology is a legally significant document containing comprehensive information necessary for setting tasks for executors to develop, implement or integrate a software product, information system, site, mobile application, portal or other IT services.
This is why we recommend entrusting drafting the terms of reference to professionals:
Professionals will analyze your future project and offer you the most productive scheme of work. For example, the release of a prototype project will save not only your budget but also time for the project in general. Release of the minimum working version of the project (MVP) will save the budget for the project and accelerate profit attraction.
The consequences of mistakes in the terms of reference (if you draft it yourself):
- An infinitely underdeveloped software product that will waste the entire budget and will not be released;
- Problems with the acceptance of work as there are no specific requirements, everyone is right, there’s nobody’s fault and the product is functioning wrong;
- Vague work requirements to significant increase in the time and budget;
- Conflict situations at all stages of project development and legal fees(in the worst case).
At this stage the cost of work is coordinated with the customer according to the terms of reference or specifications and the composition of the team participating in the project development.
The following forms of cooperation are available:
Fixed price
The given model is one of the two most popular models for cooperation. The most demanded for small and medium-sized businesses in the work on short-term and medium-term projects. The model includes the exact amount of requirements, deadlines and a fixed budget.
The customer defines a set of requirements for the final solution, which should not change throughout the term of creation of the final product. Our company in its turn provides a schedule, a detailed work plan and a monetary assessment based on the scope of work and the complexity of the project.
Time and material
This model is optimal for long-term projects with varying requirements and an undefined amount of work. If at the first stages of the project creation there is not enough data or the customer wants to get more control over the process of creating the solution, this model helps to provide flexibility to define and record changes to the project at any stage of its implementation.
This model of cooperation provides the flexibility of the size and volume of developer team load involved in the project optimizing time and costs. The total cost of the project is determined by the amount of time and resources spent, based on the number of specialists and the mutually agreed hourly rate for different categories of employees.
A dedicated team
This model allows customers to expand their staff at the expense of professionals working offsite. Our company offers a team of specialists, previously selected by the customer. The team adopts the norms and methodology of software development and project management of the customer. Project management can be carried out both on the customer’s location and from the office of our company. In both cases, the customer has full control over the software life cycle.
These are highly general questions. Nothing is clear. We need a clear task. The speed of operations in blockchain depends on the number of nodes and the policy of achieving consensus. "The ease of creating a smart contract" is also an absolutely common question as the goals of smart contracts are diverse and the development of formalized smart contracts for certain tasks can be quite complicated. Nothing is clear with the platform. What does blockchain in general have to do with telegram and e-chat? You can write your own network in general, but you should set a task first.
The whole project is divided into stages (depending on the model of cooperation) and tasks, which in turn can consist of subtasks. The project manager is given a leading role, he monitors the deadlines of task implementation and load balancing for programmers and other project participants.
To manage the project we use JIRA on our own server, Confluence for documenting and structuring information, Bitbucket (on our own server) to control the versions of the program code. Any integration with the services provided by the customer is also possible.
Conditions are always highly individual and depend on the form of cooperation as well as on the requirements of the terms of reference.
