Questions and answers
Potential clients often ask us about the company, our cooperation approach and the way we work. Please find answers for the most frequent questions on this page.
If you cannot find an answer, please email us.
General
- 24-years’ experience on the international market, with focus on the USA, the UK and the EU.
- The focus on establishing long-term relationships with the clients. Our oldest client has been working with us since 1996.
- We are experienced in building dedicated teams. We:
- unveil individual potentials and balance personal strengths
- provide guidance and training to enhance technology skill sets and implant common business culture
- propagate the client's values and goals as the team’s shared mission and introduce shared responsibility and result-oriented approach across team members.
- The teams are assembled and maintained by high-end delivery managers who take responsibility for team integrity and compliance with the client’s processes.
- Our corporate history of average 10+ years’ B2B relationships proves the concept of near shore development justified and beneficial for our clients.
- Within the common distributed team, we can work separately and deliver high-quality code.
- We pay a lot of attention to testing our deliveries (functional, security, usability, load, performance, acceptance testing). Around 30 % of our production staff are quality assurance specialists.
- Strong technology focus on Microsoft, Java, LAMP, Mobile.
- Excellent technical skills of employees.
- All employees are English-speaking; English is our internal business language.
- All employees are located in St. Petersburg, a proven international R&D destination.
Staff
- In 2010 — 14.5%
- In 2011 — 12.7%
- In 2012 — 14.6%
- In 2013 — 16.3%
- In 2014 — 15.5%
- In 2015 — 15.1%
- In 2016 — 15.7%
Resource Management
The distribution is:
- Dedicated developers — 71%
- Dedicated testers — 22%
- Dedicated business analysts — 1%
- Dedicated project managers — 6%.
This depends greatly on a number of factors: required skills (how many people with such skills or set of skills are available on the market), level of experience (seniors are harder to find), time of the year, etc.
On average, we can hire 5 FTEs of medium level within one month and 5 FTEs of senior level within 2-3 months.
On the company level, we ask our people to communicate the intention to leave the company as early as possible, at least in 3 months. In the majority of cases, that works.
However, we have to mention that, according to the local laws, the person can quit the company with only two weeks’ notice. The same law prohibits to set a longer notice period in a labour contract. Our HR and team managers take all possible measures to avoid such situations.
We cover at least half of working time practically for every time zone by means of our flexible work hours. Having 2 hours’ time difference with Europe at winter time and an hour in summer, our hours are practically synced with European customers as people working with them start at 10-11 am.
Teams working with US customers usually start later to finish the work at 10-11 pm (7/8 hours’ time difference at summer/winter time with East Coast). With customers from other time zones, we are usually able to find compromising adjustment of work hours to ensure overlap for communications and common work.
Developing a Dedicated Team
An average project team in Arcadia is 20 people (ranging from 10 to 30 people according to the scale and complexity of the task) with developers/testers team ratio from 3:1 to 4:1. A single client’s ODC can include several project teams (from 10 to 80 people).
A sample team structure:
- PM / scrum master: 1
- Tech lead: 1
- Business analyst: 1
- Senior developer (5+ years’ experience): 1-3
- Developer (2-5 years’ experience): 3-7
- Senior tester (5+ years’ experience): 1-2
- Tester (2-5 years’ experience): 2-5
- Total: 10-20
Exact structure of each team depends on project tasks, complexity, etc.
As we aim to establish long-term relationships with our clients, the minimal desired contract length is one year with a team of 5 persons.
For the initial period, we usually offer to set up a small pilot project for 1-3 person-months.
- We don’t just assign people with needed technical skills; we build teams taking into account personal relationships between people, so the team works as one organism.
- We let the client participate in the final stage of team construction — reviewing and interviewing candidates. This allows the client to impact team construction and gives understanding of candidates’ skill levels and ability to cover the client’s real needs.
- Our team is totally transparent; we do not hide resources behind one contact person assigned to communicate with the client. All team members are available for communication.
- We follow best practices and modern approaches to software development and delivery (Microsoft guidelines, SCRUM, etc.)
Arcadia strives to avoid the situation when any critical part of the business depends on one person and to ensure some backup for each key employee.
All materials, contacts and other important info about the project is stored in a common repository. So in case of vacation, departure or sick leave we would not get a situation when the absent employee is the only one person who holds critical information about the project.
We always ask our employees to notify us about planned departure in advance, preferably in three months. For this period, we add a new team member (these additional costs are covered by Arcadia) who takes over the knowledge about the project and about work done by the departing employee.
Software Development Process
We support different software development methodologies, from classic waterfall (practically not used anymore) to evolutionary prototyping, but the main methodology is based on Agile approach — mainly different modifications of SCRUM customized to the customer's needs.
Having huge experience here, we easily adopt customer methodology if it has a mature and established software development process. We can also use our own or suggest some modifications to the customer's methodology to make it more effective in outsourcing model.
We assign key persons with great experience — typically, a business analyst and a tech lead — to study the client’s system. That usually takes 2-4 weeks (depending on the complexity of the system). It is also quite useful start with a kick-off meeting, which usually takes up to one week at the client’s site.
During these kick-off meetings, the client grants Arcadia’s experts access to the application, source code and documentation; Arcadia’s experts gather all available information about the client’s application. Even more important, the contacts established on such meeting help a lot with further communications and common work.
After that, Arcadia’s experts continue to study the system at Arcadia’s site and collect all the questions about its functionality. And with that, we usually ask for a small assignment — a small new feature implementation or bug fixing — which allows us to try the system and make sure we have the right understanding.
Most projects are done in SCRUM methodology. We are experienced in performing projects in both distributed and separate teams.
Working with human resources:
- Distributed team — usually in SCRUM methodology adjusted to Client:
- daily SCRUM meetings for current situation discussion,
- weekly meetings between Arcadia’s project manager, site manager and the client’s main contact person for the project.
For daily and weekly meetings, we use chat and voice tools — Skype, Lync, GoToMeeting, WebEx, and so on.
For establishing better collaboration, we suggest regular (usually once every three months) face-to-face meetings performed in turn on Arcadia’s and the client’s site. This allows both parts of the distributed team to get to know each other better.
- Separate team — we ask the client to assign a contact person with which we agree on a suitable communication model. We can work in SCRUM or waterfall. In this case, most interaction is needed at the initial stage — drawing technical requirements (waterfall) or drawing a vision document, backlog and planning releases (SCRUM). In this case, periodical face-to-face meetings are also appreciated.
Working with IT resources:
If version control system and other tools (bug tracking, reporting, etc.) used in application development are on the client’s side, we organize a secure VPN channel and remotely work with the client’s resources
Described above is a general model which can be tailored to the client’s needs in every detail.
- A kick-off meeting (1 week) at the start of the project for gaining knowledge about the client’s system
- Regular face-to-face meetings (as described above).
Sometimes, testing is done on the client’s side before the release. This can be done to facilitate and accelerate the process of the final stage. Usually, it takes 3–4 weeks.
In case of special needs, our employees can work on the client’s side for up to 3 months.
- Arcadia considers it important that employee development and training occurs frequently and reserves the budget to ensure most of the staff update their skills every one or two years. Usually, the decision on determining training needs is made on department/project team level within a defined budget. On company level, we mainly motivate people to pass professional certifications.
- Our employees participate in professional events (conferences, seminars). We also encourage our employees to become speakers on such events.
- Sharing technical knowledge between employees is encouraged — both informally and during occasional knowledge-sharing presentations where certain employees speak about the most recent technologies, methodologies and other aspects of software development they have learned;
- Internal library (paper books + intranet electronic library replenished regularly with new editions of technical literature and materials of learning courses, seminars etc.) — a vast source of reference and learning materials available to every staff member.
Communication Technology
Service Quality
There are different procedures according to the client’s tasks and preferences. In general, these procedures fall under two main types:
- Periodical performance assessment of the whole team and of each team member. The assessment includes measures of team performance:
- Number of user stories delivered per sprint/release per team (in %)
- Ratio: what was delivered to what was committed as to be delivered (in %)
- etc.
- Measuring client satisfaction. We have a set of questions grouped by topics (quality, communication, domain knowledge, etc.). This questionnaire is filled in by team members of the client’s team on a periodic basis, usually quarterly.
As Arcadia does not have its own products and each team is dedicated to a client, individual assessment procedures depend on client’s requirements and on individual professional growth targets:
- Assessment feedback from the сlient regarding each team member:
- easiness of communication
- knowledge of English language and professional tools,
- speed of reaction on requests,
- knowledge of the client's product(s)
- Self-assessment:
- books read in main professional area
- trainings passed and certifications received
- how these new knowledge and skills affected work results
- etc.
- achieving planned results on time and on budget
- feedback from the client
- the number of issues reported by users during the maintenance period.
Once a year we ask one or two of our clients to fill in CSAT report, which is intended to measure the overall satisfaction with Arcadia’s services.
Business Continuity
- Ability to recover operation-critical data at least — the solution is to make backups and, where possible, keep ongoing project data on the client's site (very often development and testing environments are on the client’s servers or replicated on it after each minor iteration).
- Ability to recover critical part of IT infrastructure — we have no alternative data centre; however, we reserve the opportunity to deploy it at another location within a short time (depending on the situation, in testing room which whose infrastructure is similar to a data centre, or in an external hosting centre). Some services (e.g. ISP channels) are duplicated. Most of the employees are ready to start working remotely from home as soon as critical server part is recovered, as all services required for this are in place.
- Financial planning — business continuity risks are taken into account during financial planning to ensure recovery funds are available, at least on some essential level. We also invest in the preventive measures.
- Personnel — Arcadia tries to avoid the situation when any critical part of the business depends on one person and ensure some backup for key employees.
Security
We usually use a VPN connection for remote access to Arcadia’s servers or to the client’s servers (in case if the code is stored on the client’s side). The code is committed to the repository through a VPN. In case of SFTP transfer, we create a special FTP account for every client. As soon as the client confirms successful data transfer, we remove them from FTP.
Other tools can be chosen according to agreement with the client.
A special encrypted repository dedicated to the client is created at one of Arcadia’s servers.
Our servers are secured with a firewall, with personal data access rights assigned to each employee. For each project, only the employees engaged in development have access to information and code of the project.