Our Approach

Strategy - Design - Development

- Delivery & Sustaining

Strategy

The first thing we do is get to know you so we can understand what you want to accomplish. What are your target markets and business objectives and how can we build an application that will help you build your business? By thoroughly understanding your objectives and your market, we will be in the best position to create a great design and ultimately a wildly successful product.

We apply established research techniques to gather and understand client domains and target users in a short amount of time. These techniques include contextual inquiry, heuristic evaluations, information architecture mapping, and stakeholder interviews. Through all of this, our goal is to understand your real problems and determine how technology can enable the solution.

If you have already completed the necessary research prior to engaging Tacpoint, we will review and validate your findings so we can quickly move to the design phase.

Design

From ensuring the best user experience for a new application to crafting a new integration between two existing systems, great design is at the heart of everything we do. We have always believed that great software needs to combine an inspired idea, solid usability, sound architecture and the thoughtful application of technology, and we’ve demonstrated the power of this approach time and again. Our designs leverage formal standards that we use to create building blocks for innovative design concepts. We start with our solution design that includes visual user interface, usability, technical solution design, data flow and architectural design. We use technology as a way to approach the problem and we decide on the best design to solve it.

We know how important it is to translate your vision, based on your detailed knowledge of your business and market, into great design that integrates seamlessly with today’s latest technologies including Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows. As a result, constant communication with you throughout the design phase is crucial.

Wireframes illustrate proposed functions and layout of screens, including all content and controls. Storyboards provide small sketches that illustrate a sequence of actions the user may go through to get a desired result using the product. We regularly develop interactive prototypes of select workflows that empower you with the ability to conduct usability testing and internal/external demonstrations.

Through our tried-and-true design processes and techniques, we have been able to develop and deploy hundreds of successful, beautiful applications.

Development

Tacpoint has been developing great software for over 12 years. Our expertise includes a comprehensive set of platforms and development environments allowing us to select the right technology for each initiative. We’re experts in both open-source and proprietary technologies including Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows, and we thrive on delivering simple, elegant, and scalable solutions for addressing complex challenges.

Our well-balanced project teams always include a dedicated and experienced project manager so that you have a single point of contact during development that fully understands both software development and project management. They are optimized to be on task, on time, and on target, always keeping in mind your timeline and your budget.

At any time, you can go behind-the-scenes to attend any of our frequent scrums and follow the progress of our development effort. This access allows you to choose at what level you’d like to engage with our development team, and to be assured that you will always know what’s going on “under the hood.”

We specialize in design and development in the following areas:

ENTERPRISE—We understand the requirements of enterprise software including dependence on servers, networks, databases and other infrastructure resources required to allow the software to run effectively. We know the importance of licensing and integration with other systems both inside and outside the company. We are experts in dataflow and database architectures and schema. We understand the issues associated with product releases, software lifecycle and deployment of enterprise applications and realize how different these are from the consumer space.

WEB—Our customers look to us to help them develop web applications that meet their performance goals, their user’s needs and their unique brand. We provide custom design and development of web applications to deliver the most compelling and innovative results. We add our strategic insights, an intuitive user experience and stunning visual design to develop an interactive solution that perfectly suits your business needs.

MOBILE—The market for mobile applications has exploded and businesses are struggling to keep pace. Tacpoint specializes in mobile application development on Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows for business applications, consumer applications, games and mobile sites. Tacpoint is helping its customers leverage mobile devices to redefine consumer and corporate behavior in shopping, travel planning, business process management, social networking, gaming and entertainment.

Delivery & Sustaining

We stay focused through delivery and beyond. There is a critical time between “code complete” and the production release where our job is to ensure the product is completely stable and fit for purpose. As a project gets ready to ship, you will see a coordinated effort between management, the development teams and QA focused on delivery and mitigating risk.

Our delivery process incorporates various types of testing to ensure a successful deployment. We perform unit and functional testing throughout the development process to make sure that each module works as designed. As the project nears completion, that allows us to focus on integration and end-to-end testing to verify that the complete application environment interacts appropriately with the database, network, other hardware, applications, or systems as appropriate. We also invest heavily in testing automation to ensure that we create a reliable, repeatable and reusable process that will allow us to thoroughly and effectively test the application through the project. We also incorporate regression testing to verify that recent software changes added to the system do not compromise existing functionality. Regression testing is critical because of the increased complexity of today’s applications and the frequent updates and patches that impact dozens of underlying systems and functionality.

Successful deployments of software yield new challenges including demand for new features, upgrades on the latest technology platforms and improved performance.

Tacpoint understands the importance of evolving applications. We are committed to the long-term success of each project and our ongoing relationships. Sustaining engineering can often can be more challenging than developing a new application, particularly if the application uses older or limiting technologies. We not only understand these challenges, but we can help identify pitfalls and make informed recommendations for remedying such issues.