Acumen employ various measures to ensure the quality of our products.
Best Practice Guidelines
All developers adhere to our best practice guidelines for development, including system architecture and coding style.
Repository Management
Acumen use file repositories to manage, version, and deploy our software.
Advantages are:
Easy to upgrade, or to rollback
Acumen can deploy quickly and confidently, and can roll back to a previous version just as fast.
Code Review
Our developers can easily browse the entire history of our projects, examining recent changes, or the change history of a particular component of a project. This makes it easy for all our developers to be aware of others’ changes to the system, and greatly eases the process of collaborative working - developers are notified if someone else is working on the same part of the project as them, and can easily merge their changes with someone elses.
In fact, we think document repositories are so useful that we made a product to allow non technical users to benefit from them.
Ticketing and Bug Tracking
As and when bugs are noticed during development, they’re filed in our issue tracking system.
This is fully integrated with our file repository, meaning that when an issue is identified, the developer can fix it, commit their changes to the file repository, and link the ticket to the exact change that fixed the issue.
Retention of Knowledge
Once software is deployed and signed off, many companies move on to new projects and forget about your software - in many cases this is perfectly reasonable. However, if your organisation requires changes and updates 12 months later, you may find that the relevant staff have moved on and the cost and timescales for gearing the project back up is untenable.
Acumen place a high regard on retaining institutional knowledge (or institutional memory), as it increases our ability to react quickly and knowledgably to similar tasks and projects. All staff, including software developers and account managers, are required to document lessons learned and key facts about projects they’ve contributed to - typically in the form of a project Wiki - but also by producing key documents and test cases This means we are always read any able to help develop projects further and provide a dedicated and reliable support process if required.
