Agile Software Development

Black Pepper is a leading Agile IT Consultancy with a proven track record of delivering business value to high profile clients. We value the agile methods:

  • Focus on working software: provides immediate feedback and greater control of projects
  • Working with our customers: delivering visible business value alongside you and your teams
  • Test Driven Development: giving valuable real time metrics on velocity, burn down and productivity
  • Delivering experience and expertise: through pair programming, refactoring, and shared code ownership

How we can help

Agile methods can help you gain better control of your software development projects, delivering more value faster and with a higher degree of quality than traditional waterfall approaches. Black Pepper can help if any of the following statements are familiar:

  1. I have too many requirements and not enough resources to deliver
  2. The business keeps changing priorities and we constantly need to change focus
  3. All my requirements take more than three weeks to develop
  4. We usually miss deployment deadlines to make sure all features are present
  5. We plan up front and hold lessons learned at the end of each project
  6. QA is separate from our project teams
  7. We have less than 25% of automated test coverage on our code base

We use best of breed technologies, such as Java / J2EE / Javascript, GWT, Eclipse, Selenium, Adobe Flex, Ruby, Jira, Hudson and a suite of open source development tools to minimise upfront costs. You'll learn most about us from our blogs, or just contact us to discuss our methods and delivery options in more detail.

 

 

Why not read our latest white paper "Business Agility with IT" that considers how IT can add real value to a business during times of change ...

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When Less is More

Reducing Memory Footprints = Less Hardware + Improved Scalability

Black Pepper have recently completed a project for a major Banking client. Faced with an increased demand for their software services, our client needed to be confident that their application would scale effectively to meet higher volumes of users without the need to increase the underlying hardware and operational infrastructure linearly. Having examined the application in depth, Black Pepper recommended removing one component of the architecture - the Hibernate Object / Relationship Management package - and replacing this function with a bespoke persistence layer.

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RESTful Services and the Cloud

Most people will have stumbled across the concept of The Cloud – an extreme piece of hyperbole that claims to be the next generation of computing. Removing the hype, the Cloud promises an independence from owning and administering your own individual computing resources, allowing you to consume IT services (storage, processing power, or applications) from “somewhere else” - i.e. the Cloud – without having to know or worry too much about the mechanics.

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Rejuvenating Java applications

With Oracle's acuisition of Sun now complete, many companies are revisiting existing Java-based applications to consider the impact of this merger on their investment in this technology. Although Oracle's plans for the language and underlying platform remain unclear, now is definitely the right time to examine Java-based applications and consider breathing new life into what may become "legacy applications".
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Flex acceptance testing and continuous integration

The problem I had is how to automate acceptance or functional testing of a web application with a Flex front end. I wanted to solve this problem because functional testing increases confidence that the software meets customers' requirements. Automating the tests - coding tests and running them as part of the build - pays dividends over and over, as agile developers well know. We're able to check that user stories are implemented and catch bugs early in the lifecycle.

Kieran's blog entry unit testing Flex tells how he solved the problem of writing and automating unit tests for Flex front-ends. He found there was little available material on unit testing for Flex - and I found even less on acceptance testing for Flex. However, we had done automated acceptance testing for non-Flex web apps.
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