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.
The distribution is:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
There are different procedures according to the client’s tasks and preferences. In general, these procedures fall under two main types:
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:
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.
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.