Cake Solutions Limited

Project Management

Cake Solutions combine their real world system programming experience with a high quality on line and build project management systems to ensure all projects are delivered on time, on budget and to a high standard.

• Process
• Tools

Process

The Cake Agile Process is the workflow we use to manage and implement our application development. Each part of the process is an important milestone in the project and has a deliverable.

The Cake Agile Process

The Cake Budget Qualifier

Purpose – To quickly show Cake has understood the basic requirements and to provide the client with an idea of the budget required for the project.

Deliverable – E-mail with an outline of the project requirements, a ball park cost and timescale.

The Cake Project Plan

Purpose – The “Bible” used by Cake to formulate the “Cake Project Blueprint” and the testing plan. Used by the client as a signed cost, timescale and featureset document.

Deliverable – A project proposal document that contains the detailed specification, timescales, cost and terms of business. Signed by both parties before a project is begun.

Cake Project Blueprint

Purpose – Predominantly internal documents used for project management. Also available on the Cake wiki for clients to view.

Deliverable – Architecture document and Project Plan document.

h3(#iterativedevelopment). Cake Iterative Development

Purpose – The code which is automatically deployed to a test server every night and avialabe for clients to see as a developing application.

Deliverable – The application as it is developed which allows the feedback process to begin.

Cake Handover Recipe

Purpose – To handover the completed application to the client as bug free as possible.

Deliverable – Completed and tested application ready for user testing.

Cake Legendary Support

Purpose – To provide ongoing system development and maintenance regulated by an agreed service level contract.

Deliverable – Maintenance Contract.

Tools

We use the following software to manage our projects, which we describe in more detail below.

These tools are being used as part of our ISO9001 quality standard.

Cake Infrastructure & Management Tools

Jira

We use Atlassian Jira as our project management software. Jira allows us to specify the requirements for each version, create and manage project roadmaps and to track any bugs in the software. You will be able to track the progress of the project, submit any new requirements and bug reports. Jira closely integrates with our internal time-tracking management. Typical page showing the status of a project is shown on Figure 1.

Figure 1 Jira Project Roadmap Page

Confluence

We use Atlassian Confluence to keep our development team as well as our clients up to date on other news in the company as well as other unrelated, but interesting information. Figure 2 shows typical Confluence page.

Figure 2 Cake Solutions Confluence

Bamboo

Bamboo is a central tool we use to manage the automated builds. Rather than using complex shell scripts on the server to perform the quite complex nightly build we rely on Bamboo, which integrates with the best Java EE build tools: Ant and Maven.

Bamboo generates a number of reports that give us insight into each project. We can find out details about every build. The status of the build is the obvious information, but we can also find details about the time each build took (this allows us to keep an eye on the software performance.

Figure 3 Bamboo

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