Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company
iQuinceSoft is an ISO 9001: 2015 certified organization with 6+ years of experience. iQuinceSoft is a team of young and dedicated web and mobile app developers, listed among a few chosen companies on some well known platforms with 100% positive recommendations. We deliver tangible business benefits with the reliability, robustness and scalability that the customer demands. Our team consists of designers and programmers with expertise in iPhone & Android App, Open Source (PHP, Joomla, Zencart, OsCommerce, Wordpress, Laravel, Zend, Yii, Cakephp, and Codeigniter).
I am founder and CEO of iQuinceSoft. My role is to manage and set up a complete project management, communication process and infrastructure for iQuinceSoft which includes tools, techniques and principles to provide a foundation for an effective transfer of information among customer and employees.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
My story began with a visionary dream. A dream to build a process oriented company that follows ethical business practices where employees feel pride and customers get desired satisfaction every time. While I was serving as Project Management Head (I) observed various things, i.e. miscommunication between customer and technical team. I also realized that the communication gap between employee and customer had severe consequences as employee couldn't deliver the best outcome due to lack of understanding and eventually the customer was unsatisfied.
So I envisioned to establish a process oriented web and mobile app development agency powered by employee’s Head, Heart and Hands to serve customers better. Pulling this off however, was not a piece of cake because I belong to a middle class Indian family and my dream to create the process oriented company was strained by a lot of hindrances, finance being the biggest of them. I rented a small apartment and inaugurated iQuinceSoft on 27th June 2012.
As the results of my constant efforts and sticking to the basics, finally I have succeeded in taking iQuinceSoft to the level where we have 50+ employees, served 1500+ customers, completed 3000+ projects. We actively engage in CSR activities, we have planted 470 trees on different places. We will keep this up and encouraging people to do the same.
At present iQuinceSoft is being operated by the highly creative heads! – We ensure every bits and pieces of the web and mobile app solution delivered by us should reflect the user experience and values to customer business! We have adopted Agile software development methods. As much as our unique approach and process is key to our business’s success, it’s our capability to execute and interface our best software development process to our customers’ needs that ensures mutual business relationships built on trust.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We follow an in-house team model with development centre in India. All the projects end to end exaction (which) is handled by our team members and developers. We do not outsource any work. We have a team of highly experienced PHP, iPhone, android Developers, web designers, QA & Testing, Business Analysts and management.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
We always start with a very basic question "What are the customer’s fundamental needs, and what we need to offer to match the customer requirements?
As miscommunication increases the costs and time for both customer and service provider so one of the priority tasks is to define proper communication channels between customer and our development team.
We have no doubt that we have a skilled design and development team who can deliver a quality web and mobile app to customers, but to deliver a solution which should match the customer fundamental needs, it is required to gather, analyze and properly document the customer requirements so our team can understand the actual project needs. During requirement gathering phase, not only we document what customer tells but also our expert business analysis team gives them suggestions to make product as per the industry’s latest standards and with unique offerings.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?
Our targeted industries are Both B2B and B2C. We are regularly offering web and mobile app development services (to) industries such as automobiles, consumer markets, education & training, financial services, food processing, healthcare, infrastructure, insurance, IT & ITES, manufacturing, Media & entertainment, pharmaceuticals, real estate, research & development, retail, science & technology, textiles and tourism & hospitality.
We have over 70% of repetitive clients.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a web app.
The process requires collaboration of different professionals, with each of them playing a different role.
There are following tasks which are crucial in determining the project time and cost estimation:
• Customers do not visualize the site they want prior to its development. Therefore, they keep changing their needs throughout the entire project making it even harder for the web designer to work within the initial budget. So it is imperative to do proper requirement gathering by offering expert advice to finalize and document the scope of project.
• Do the proper feasibility checks prior to signing the contract with customer – Feasibility involve Technical, Economical, Operational & Schedule feasibility.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a web app?
A web application is divided into two parts – the front end and the back end. While it is believed that web designers take care of the front end and web programmers the back end. We first complete the front end part and when same (is) approved by customer, we initiate with the backend development. It takes 20:80 (20% resource required for frontend design creation and 80% for the backend development).
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a web application?
In this current day and age, pushing out a finished, polished application well before your competitor is a key. Coding everything from scratch, excluding even the mundane things, can be extremely time consuming and makes the developer spend time reinventing the wheel, time which could rather be spent implementing new features or tightening up the code base. This is where web development frameworks come in. The key aspects we consider in selecting the right platform are usage context, license, software pattern, hosting requirements, ease of installation, learning curve, core library, DB Abstraction & ORM, included JS library and scaling.
Which platform and technologies do you prefer to use in development of your web apps?
We prefer Core PHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, CakePHP, Yii, Zend Framework and most other PHP frameworks.
Do you offer website design templates or customised website design, and do you have a responsive website design?
We offer responsive website design templates/Customized website design.
Which Content Management System do you prefer to use (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc)?
We use Wordpress, Drupal, Modx, Concrete5, MotoCMS, ExpressEngine, Opencart, Bigcommerce, Joomla, Zencart and OsCommerce.
Do you provide website maintenance services?
Yes we do provide website maintenance services.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a web application?
We consider various factors while deciding the cost of developing a web application such as list of features, (&) the level of expertise required completing those features.
Following are two different methodologies we use to determine a more probable cost of a specific web application.
• The first is based on a functional specification created after detailed requirement gathering sessions with a customer. The so called waterfall approach implies development and allows calculating necessary time and budgeting rather accurately. But it does not involve changes that are possible throughout the project.
• The second approach is based on user stories where the client usually tells us what the final user of the application should receive from the project. The user stories normally underlie Agile software development methodology which is more iterative and incremental. For a client it means that the terms and budget discussed may be more flexible.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We generally follow Pay per milestone payment structure, where we carefully define milestones to be delivered along with timelines for each project. Out of the total project cost, we ask for a partial upfront payment and the remaining is divided as per the milestones defined. Upon successful delivery of a particular milestone and client’s approval, we ask customer to process the payment.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
Yes, we generally consider projects that are in range of $5000- $50,000 and above. However, if we find a project that is interesting, adds value to our portfolio or gives us the opportunity to work on latest and trending technologies, we definitely qualify and evaluate such projects in a differentiated manner.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2016?
The price range of projects we work on is $5000 -$50000.
