Approach

Quality Vision
The approach we use to deliver the services grounds on the specific understanding of Quality concept shared across the company. According to this concept Quality stands on the three foundations - Professionalism, Motivation and Communication. Professionalism is defined by the range and the depth of the skills we possess and application experience in real projects. Motivation reflects teammates’ aspiration to deliver results in a best possible way with mutual assistance and understanding of common goals. Under Communication we mean knowledge sharing and propagation between all stakeholders and all stages of the software development cycle.

 

Quality cannot be built-in into the product or service directly. But all together Professionalism, Motivation and Communication form sides of a figure we call Triangle of Quality (see Figure above). From this picture it is easy to see that Quality level is defined by the triangle square. So our strategy is to constantly invest efforts to gain as much value as possible on the each of the dimensions. This strategy bases on comprehensive HR policy, state-of-the-art long-life learning procedures and constant process engineering operations.

Quality Management
In our work we distinguish quality of a product we produce and quality of the processes, which the product is a result of. The first element is guarded by Quality Control – a set of activities taken on different stages of the project and applied to different artifacts in order to validate if they match stated quality criteria. Although they are just a kind of different activities carried out to assure the quality of the resulting product, traditionally they are thought as a separate class of activities
The second element is provided by Quality Assurance – a complex of measures taken on all levels of our organization in order to verify that product is produced right in sense of achieving maximum profitability with maximum customers’ satisfaction.
There is also a meta-level called Quality Management, carried out by Quality Management Board that is responsible for:

• Setting the Quality Assurance goals
• Making decisions considering Quality Assurance (e.g. introduction of the methodologies, approaches and procedures)
• Executing control of Quality Assurance and Development processes
• Formalization and maintenance of the internal regulatory documentation

Development Process
NIX Solutions follows the principle “ A methodology per project, per team”. This thesis means that process definition for particular project depends on project size, criticality, available team and other conditions. The essence of process engineering in NIX is a construction of development case (project configuration) fitting the given project basing on one of the following industry-wide frameworks:

• Extensive Unified Process
• Lightweight Unified Process
• eXtreme Programming
• Lightweight eXtreme Programming

While the framework provides a form-factor for the process the development case defines the final shape of the process: lifecycle, lifecycle objectives, activities, input and output artifacts, tools and operation environment, key roles and responsibilities, etc. - everything we need about the process to ensure common understanding and preserving the stakeholders’ needs.