Our process
We track your users, measure against your goals, and improve your product ecosystem.
From goal-setting to go-live and beyond
Our elite cross-functional teams — from strategists to engineers — use only the best solutions to turn the most complex part of your business into a competitive advantage.
1. Goals
Define your business challenges and your goals
It begins with conversations to discover your business goals and what lies ahead. Your goals figure prominently in our discussions. Be prepared; we keep the questions coming! Through interviews, storyboards, and scenarios, we examine your current business processes and existing technology environment, helping identify a potential value solution that meets your business goals.
We interview and workshop, bringing in you and your key people to discuss your current needs, technical issues, security and regulation concerns, software and users—whatever is keeping your business from moving forward.
We provide research and strategy. Our experts have prior experience in many fields: healthcare, financial, energy, retail, non-profit sector and more.
We craft a value solution—a response to these discussions and interviews, mapping out a potential solution to your business goals and demands.
2. Scope
Define & refine the scope of your project
With a value solution mapped out, our Business Systems Analyst (BSA) works with you to establish the scope of your project and we help to brainstorm all aspects of the desired solution. These feature requests are captured and tracked in a Feature Priority Matrix. We further define and refine, developing user stories around the highest priority features.
We develop user stories built around your project’s feature requests, mapping these to security requirements, regulations, and proposed technology platforms.
We wire frame the user interface (UI) developed from user stories with guidance from our Information Architects or your own resources.
Our BSA and subject experts make clear recommendations matching the right technology, systems, and user design with your solution.
3. Requirements & estimation
Craft the requirements and provide detailed, honest estimates
Working from user stories, we build a requirements document and define the level of effort needed to deliver your project’s solution. We provide you with a project schedule with estimated timelines and clearly explained costs.
We define your solution’s platform, whether its custom software development using Ruby on Rails or Java, leveraging Salesforce, a new website in WordPress or other proven technology platform.
We identify all parts of the solution’s back end including databases, servers, web services, file storage, website hosting, security protocols, and all necessary licensing and software/hardware purchasing options.
Our development team lead and BSA map out and prioritize requirements into development phases or sprints, marking a clear path for developers to begin work on your project.
4. Development
Balancing efficiency & quality
Now it’s time for our developers to get to work. We deliver your solution in phases, developing functionality and features in sprints. Our designers work from wireframes to craft the front end’s appearance and functionality. Programmers, data analysts and database architects solidify the back end components, web services and reports.
Our front-end designers and developers leverage best practices and innovations in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. We deliver websites that are responsive and work well on all target screens: from smartphones to desktops to kiosks.
Our programmers use modern coding techniques and follow the latest industry-accepted practices to build secure systems for your solution.
Our data analysts and database experts craft your solution’s data platform; we use powerful web services with redundancy and high-availability so your solution is robust and can withstand high-user traffic scenarios.
5. Quality assurance
Delivering on time and on budget
As we complete each development sprint, we communicate with you on your project’s status. Our meetings will highlight progress, discuss any impediments or roadblocks, and track requested changes and improvements. During development and its conclusion, we develop quality assurance tests that cover all features and user stories.
We develop test plans that trace back to user stories and features, checking for coverage across all functionality provided by the solution.
Our QA testing includes system functionality tests, user interface tests, regression tests (testing previously-released features again so they are not broken by new features), smoke tests (testing across the entire platform), and aiding you in conducting user acceptance tests.
We coordinate the date of delivery for your solution to ensure a smooth rollout. This includes the activation of user accounts, checking all required software licenses, web site hosting, database and web service connectivity.
6. Training & support
Going beyond “live"
Your investment and partnership with RTS Labs is part of a process that continues after your solution has been delivered and deployed. Your new solution should adapt as your business goals and requirements evolve.
We can provide training, documentation, and help guides so your users can take full advantage of your new solution.
We can provide technical support in several forms to keep your new solution functioning and to respond to reported issues.
We believe in maintaining contact and invite you to approach RTS Labs to enhance your current solution or to tackle your next big project or requirement.