Software Development

We work with you to understand your business, goals, and target users to define the app’s scope and objectives. Developing a statement of business requirements can be the hardest part for you. Existing and broken processes can be improved upon rather than taking what you have and putting it into an app. Our business analysts will support you with identifying your requirements and finding solutions that generate positive returns. This can be achieved through workshops, spending time with your key stakeholders to develop a clear understanding of your requirements.

A picture paints a thousand words so mockups of most screens would be produced so that your users can provide valuable feedback before any design is committed to code. It’s much quicker for us (and thus cheaper for you) to amend drawings and documents than it is code and therefore we prefer to do as much iteration at this early stage as possible.

Our expert designers create wireframes and a visually appealing and intuitive user interface, ensuring a seamless user experience.

We get this right before we begin to write any code. Our business analysts will support you to create a specification that is tailored to your business, and solves your specific challenges.

Once the functional requirements are agreed we produce a technical specification which is largely intended for developer eyes only, but is still available for viewing as part of the overall collaborative document set. The combined functional and technical documents allow us to produce accurate estimates of the amount of work required.

Our skilled developers bring the design to life, writing disciplined, quality code incorporating the latest technologies to build a robust mobile application. Our focus is on reducing technical debt, getting things right first time for you.

We assemble a project team which we strive to keep together as much as possible and this team then builds and performs initial testing of the work. For this we stick to common industry practices with source control used for all work and ‘Pull Requests’ used as a QA method when merging changes into the main development branch.

We use Microsoft’s .Net platform to write all of our backend code. Over the years .Net has evolved from a Windows-only closed box to an open source and cross platform collaboration with the wider developer community which has resulted in one of the best and fastest open platforms available. We’ve been using the various versions of .Net for over 17-years now and have built up an extensive ‘Rio.Core’ library that delivers functionality common across almost all projects we work on and avoids us having to reinvent the wheel each time. Frontend technology varies according to the type of frontend. 

For mobile applications, .Net MAUI is our preferred choice. As the name suggests, this is part of the wider .Net offering from Microsoft and allows us to build native iOS and Android applications with one codebase.

Once the project’s lead developer is satisfied with the work, it’s deployed as an internal staging environment for QA testing. QA testing is typically done by a Business Analyst familiar with the requirements and they will be testing the system not just in terms of functionality, performance, and reliability but also that it delivers an excellent and intuitive user experience.

With sign-off in Staging achieved, that version of the application is then moved onto your User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment for testing by project stakeholders and, ideally, relevant users as they are the people who will be using the system day in, day out.

Once UAT is signed-off, the work can be deployed to Live.

User adoption is critical which is why we support you with training. We offer train the trainer services, video training resources as well as a training manual.

We assist in deploying the solution, including to the respective app stores, in the case of app development, ensuring a smooth and timely launch. We will also run workshops and field questions from users for you.

Post-launch, we provide ongoing support and maintenance, ensuring your software remains up-to-date and functional. Most customers choose to have us manage the environment that’s hosting their services in a AWS environment. We can keep operating systems patched frequently (typically monthly) and also respond to any relevant zero-day patches.

The developed applications will also have some third party dependencies and these also receive updates. 

Additionally, we recommend managing the release of client dependencies, such as Chrome, so that new releases can be tested against the application to be sure there’s no change within them that will cause the application to have an issue. Generally a review of the release notes is enough, but for updates to iOS or Android a test on a device running the latest beta in advance of the public release is best. 

We would also propose to have monitoring in place to keep an eye on all aspects of the ecosystem to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

Should a bug have found its way into live, or something environmental has caused an issue then this should be reported to Rio where it will be triaged and fixed appropriately.

We can take care of everything for you relating to the development or hosting of the application ecosystem, unless the you decide that you take care of it all.