Asap Developers

We’ve recently started working on a software tool—called Bacon—that complements our business, which is being developed by asap.
Bacon is a management platform for servers and workstations for enterprises that coordinates several open technologies. It allows for a more modern and easy-to-use management experience to do things like patching, installing and uninstalling software, remote scripting, monitoring, and general system control.
Our first goal for this project was to completely refactor a piece of code we had written in-house, as well as to have the front-end changed to ReactJS, which has been accomplished. Our next goal is to keep adding features and providing support for the product.

We went online and looked at reviews for companies specializing in Python and Django since our tool had been started using those. We did a worldwide search using numerous sources and finally narrowed it down to two that we liked. We actually started with a different firm but weren’t so happy with the experience so we brought asap in to take over and things have improved considerably since then.

asap provided us with full-stack development, i.e. both back-end and front-end development. However, before they could get started, they had to assess the existing code. They then had to work on the full refactor and the ReactJS front-end, which had to be completely rewritten. That was the scope of the first part of the project but, as I mentioned, it is now an ongoing relationship.

Regarding the team, Pablo Dacoll is our PM. He’s a great communicator who gives us good support and is skillful at translating our thoughts and ideas to the developers. Then, there’s Fabricio who is great at the more complex areas and at guiding the other software engineers. He mainly works on the back-end but is a full-stack developer so he can do front-end as well if needed. Finally, there are about six other team members working on either front (ReactJS) or back-end (Django and Python).
Pablo coordinates with four people on the TWE team: myself, our graphic designer and UX expert, our operations manager and one of our chief engineers. We communicate over Slack, email and web conferences. Our tracking methodology is pretty standard, with Jira for ticketing and a Kanban board for managing the project. I add tasks directly to the board and assign them. When dealing with larger requirements, asap gives me estimates regarding time expectations to get an idea of the cost and I approve them accordingly so they can be implemented. Pablo also provides weekly breakdowns on the number of hours, which, together with a monthly report, makes billing and productivity easy to follow.

We’re very happy with asap and the relationship we’ve built with them so far. They are very transparent and have an extremely talented team. We’ve developed a more professional product that has allowed us to start bringing the early-adopter phase to the market. We are now actively marketing the product, which was a major long-term goal for us.
Our next major goal is to reach a certain level of maturity, going from the early-adopter phase—where bugs and not-fully developed features are to be expected—to having the features the customer needs in place and working properly 80% of the time. Hopefully, we’ll be finished at least with our planned, core features by the end of February. We then hope to achieve product maturity by mid-year—July or so.

The initial goal was to create a prototype of an idea I have to prove certain things were possible in order to develop an app in the future. For example, we wanted to make sure we could auto-populate and fax a form required by the government for hiring a teacher. With that in mind, I looked for development and software companies online and happened to see an ad from asap offering a free consultation. This was something no other companies offered and I really appreciated it. I also did some more research into the company and saw they had good reviews. It was a very pleasant experience so I am very happy I chose them.

Work with asap began by detailing the process. I wrote down the steps from the user experience point of view and they reviewed it and asked some questions. asap then brought the team on board to do a basic wireframing of the app and put together some process flows. As for team composition, Pablo worked as the Project Manager and we worked with a couple of developers as well. There were four to five people working on the project; it was fun to work with them, I really enjoyed it. I appreciated their questions; this was a new field for them but everyone was very excited to work on it and genuinely enjoyed learning about it.

Project management was extremely effective. We had online meetings once a week to review progress, answer questions, and give each other updates. In addition to that, we also emailed throughout the week if something came up, which made me feel they were very engaged and proved they were very organized and knew what they were doing.
Regarding the results, personally, the impact was huge. I felt remotivated and reenergized to continue with the project. Moreover, it forced me to refocus as it showed me there was a lot more still to do. Professionally, it has also made a difference because now it’s more than just an idea. Although it’s still a prototype, I’m a step closer to having the finished application. The biggest potential issue was the faxing of the form and we have proven that it can be solved.

I really enjoyed working with asap. In addition to getting a top-quality product, they genuinely care about their clients, which is why I am now working on acquiring funding so I can keep working with them.