Our Methodology Process

Make -Test - Validate - Adjust - Repeat

When you partner with Rivet Hammer we assemble an experienced cross-disciplinary product team to make your vision real. Our designers and engineers work together with a shared goal: utilize our software development methodology to collaborate with you and your team to create something great. Product managers lead the engagement. Software architects define the technology. Designers and UX/UI experts create beautiful intuitive interfaces and Engineers diligently ship working software early and often.

1
Vetting the Idea
2
Discovery Sprint
3
Project Scoping
4
Platform Architecture
5
Agile Development
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    Plan Sprint
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    Design
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    Develop
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    Test
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    Release
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    Demo
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    Feedback
6
Product Launch
7
Post-Development

icon_1 Vetting the Idea

We don’t just build whatever comes our way. We’ve got to love the idea and feel it will make a massive difference in the market and for your business. The first step is to hand-pick only the best projects. No matter how good the idea sounds or how confident our client is, we put the app through a rigorous vetting process, polishing and streamlining the idea along the way.

Our team stress-tests every project that comes through Rivet Hammer’s doors. We work with you to understand why your idea makes sense, why it’s going to be successful, why anyone would care about it. This is where our expert strategists will challenge assumptions and overhaul business plans.

We ask tough questions while seeing the possibility and potential for what we can create together. Only then, are we ready to start planning, designing and building anything. During the vetting process, we’ll assess fit, you’ll learn about us and we’ll learn about you and decide if our cultures and work styles fit together. From there, we can decide if it makes sense to move forward and build something incredibly special together.

icon_2 Discovery Sprint

A discovery sprint lasts 2-4 days and follows a similar workflow as our Roadmapping process to gather and understand the technical and business requirements for your software product. This phase can be done in person or through remote collaboration. The goal is to help you answer the question, “What exactly should we build?”.

Your project starts long before we write any code. Coding focuses on technologies and languages, but preparing for a software project involves the larger process of understanding your business, how you’ll measure ROI, user needs, potential risks and future opportunities. We’ll do this collaboratively through discussion, sketching out workflows, and deciding on solutions.

First, we’ll sit down and discuss your project in depth. We strive to quickly become subject matter experts in your business and target market. Once we understand your business, your users, and case scenarios, we’ll create personas for each user type and begin establishing requirements. We will then draft user stories to set our process in motion. By creating case scenarios and defining your users, we establish the product requirements essential in moving forward. This process enables us to develop a feature list and ultimately kickoff the engagement with project management, the design team, and the development team working collaboratively.

Together we’ll define, explore and document all aspects of the product you want to create including:

  • Review of current system(s)
  • Business ecosystem mapping
  • Competitive analysis
  • Existing product audit
  • User research and interviews
  • User personas
  • Creating, refining and validating context scenarios and user stories to understand how users will engage with your company and software
  • Collaborative sketching
  • Feature backlog and value-based prioritization

icon_1 Project Scoping

The success of a project is directly related to the quality of the upfront scoping we create through collaboration as a team. It consists of capturing customer requirements determining and documenting a list of specific project goals, deliverables, tasks, and deadlines. The purpose of project scoping is to define and describe all aspects of the product we will build together. The Project Scope provides a view of the estimated number of sprints required to meet the requirements of the project. The outcome of the Project Scoping phase is a Functional Specification Document (FSD) and a backlog of all user stories. The Functional Specification Document (FSD) is your project’s bible. It’s a plain-English, written description of how your app platform is going to work. It’s what our designers use to come up with designs and our developers use as a guideline for coding. It is the foundation for all the steps to come.

Throughout this process, Rivet Hammer will dive into understanding your business, your customer, who will be using your product, and together we will discover new and innovative product ideas and solutions to be developed. We’ll view the product from your customer’s experience and build out user personas and scenarios our teams can leverage as a filter to cull out the best solutions that will deliver the highest value in solving your customer’s pain points. Each feature will be prioritized and added to a task backlog so we can launch quickly with the highest customer impact. 

The Project Scoping phase helps us align our vision and goals into a clear development path so we can move forward together. Deliverable: Functional Specification Document, Story Map, User Story Backlog, Estimated Project Budget.

icon_2 Platform Architecture

In the Platform Architecture phase, we design the overall architecture and technology stack of the app, ensuring that we encompass both short term and long term plans and product goals. This is achieved by analyzing the requirements outlined in the Functional Specifications Document as well as structural and navigational features.

Rivet Hammer builds software solutions on any language, technical stack, and platform, for both web and mobile. This flexible philosophy allows us to build towards achieving your business goals without presenting a narrow solution-set just because we may be experts in it.

icon_2 Agile Development

icon Plan Sprint

Every two weeks, we hold sprint planning meetings to assign tasks to specific designers and engineers. The goal is to have a collection of completed designs and functional features at the end of each sprint.

We interview and gather requirements from you and your team, outside subject matter experts, end users, and key business stakeholders to ensure we’re designing an optimal solution to meet their needs.

Once the sprint begins, each morning we hold a stand-up meeting to report what has been accomplished, what we intend to accomplish that day, and anything that stands in our way. This process keeps the entire team in the loop and any potential impediments on our radar.

Project Plan
We create a comprehensive project sprint plan for each design and development phase of the project. We establish clear milestones, deliverables, and relevant stakeholders for each deliverable. This ensures that the project team knows what we plan to work on, in what order, and when we plan to review each milestone.

Story grooming
At the beginning of each sprint iteration, we start with a grooming session, where stories are analyzed, improved if necessary, and divided up into tasks. The team sets development priorities and focused tasks for the coming two-week’s work. We review the work completed to date, and appropriately adjust from the original plan based on what we’ve learned to make sure we’re on track to deliver the highest value product for your budget. 

icon Design

The design phase is where we create beautiful, easy-to-use interfaces that delight users and make your company and product look great.When our UX team has a thorough understanding of the task at hand, we’ll begin creating detailed information architecture diagrams which outlines how users will interact with your application.

These details serve as the roadmap for wireframing, high level interactions, page elements, and hierarchy. Then, wireframes set the foundation to test via clickable prototype. We’ll finalize the aesthetic with pixel-perfect comps.

Before we write a single line of code, we take inventory and organize your application with low-fidelity wireframes and mockups. Here, the full application can be explored and changes are pain‑free.

Wireframes -Move quickly and test often with lightweight prototypes that highlight key interactions. This is an iterative process based on feedback, testing, and edits, with bi-weekly reviews of deliverables with the stakeholder and development teams at the end of each sprint.

Prototypes and User Testing – Outside of the core stakeholders and product team, the best way to get valuable feedback is to put the product in the hands of real users as features are completed.

Visual design – Perfect the layouts created in wireframes and create a flexible and unique design system that works across multiple devices. Add moments of delight to expected behaviors with animations, transitions and fun interactions.

Design Scrubs – Prior to the end-of-sprint demos, the design team reviews the latest build for completeness, satisfying design intent and expected behaviors.

icon Development

In the Development phase we code and implement what will become your product. We produce maintainable, extensible and highly usable software. We begin with the most essential features, so we deliver the most value early on in the process.

We build your custom software incrementally, one designed and fully-tested feature at a time, rather than creating many incomplete features all at once. We add new value to the project at each iteration.

Our development philosophy is holistic, meaning we create solutions for any language, technical stack, and platform including web, mobile, and frankly, anything else with a screen. We architect solutions based on your individual needs, best interests, infrastructure, and business strategy, rather than allowing technical limitations to guide our implementation.

icon Testing

We consider quality assurance and testing absolutely critical to every project we take on—that’s why our QA team members are involved from day one through product launch (and after). We aren’t satisfied until your app runs the gauntlet of our automated and manual tests, and makes it through intact. Our quality assurance process ensures that all elements are optimized and ready for launch prior to deployment.

Design Team Review
Prior to the end of sprint demos, the design team reviews the latest build for completeness, satisfying design, and expected behaviors.

Test on Real Devices
The QA team executes all testing on real devices and operating systems relevant to the product so we see what your users see. This includes testing across all device OSs on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile.

icon Release

We consider quality assurance and testing absolutely critical to every project we take on—that’s why our QA team members are involved from day one through product launch (and after). We aren’t satisfied until your app runs the gauntlet of our automated and manual tests, and makes it through intact. Our quality assurance process ensures that all elements are optimized and ready for launch prior to deployment.

Design Team Review
Prior to the end of sprint demos, the design team reviews the latest build for completeness, satisfying design, and expected behaviors.

Test on Real Devices
The QA team executes all testing on real devices and operating systems relevant to the product so we see what your users see. This includes testing across all device OSs on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile.

icon Demo

At the close of the sprint we schedule a product demo with you and your team to show completed work and get immediate feedback. All project stakeholders are invited to take part in the demo.

All sprints culminate with a build. You have instant access to the work that was completed. In the case of mobile applications, we use tools like Apple TestFlight to deliver the application to mobile for all interested project stakeholders.

These consistent two-week demo feedback loops keep us on track, adapt to market and customer feedback, and add new ideas as we develop the product. The rigor we apply together to this feedback-learning loop helps us differentiate between just an average product to a solution and interface that positively impacts your market. 

icon Feedback

As the development team works through the backlog during each two-week sprint, change continues to happen out in the world. For example, the team can learn about new market opportunities to take advantage of, competitor threats that arise, and feedback from customers that can change the way the product was meant to work. All of these new ideas trigger the team to adjust and adapt the backlog to incorporate new knowledge. This is part of the fundamental mindset of an agile team. The world changes, the backlog is never finished.

By inviting key stakeholders and end customers to provide feedback before the final product is launched, you can save time and money on pushing unnecessary features forward. What’s more, you’ll end up with a more valuable and refined product, accurately tailored to your target audience.

icon_2 Final UAT + Launch

Before we ship your app, we run it through a final User Acceptance Testing process. We perform end-to-end testing with real or simulated users in order to ensure the complete system achieves your business goals. Once our Quality Assurance team gives us the green light, your app is ready for launch!

All the work and effort put into making your application a reality would all be for naught if it’s unreachable or buckles under load. We can configure servers and work with your IT staff to ensure scalability and monitoring. When your product is ready, Rivet Hammer helps you bring it to the world—deploying it to the cloud provider, getting approval from the App store, or integrating it into your company’s infrastructure.

Deployment and Launch

With sign off on all sides, we’re ready to push to production and/or submit to respective app stores. We’ll work with you every step of the way to make sure the launch is a success. When it’s time to hand off the product over to your team, we’ll offer training and maintenance to ensure a smooth transition.

icon_1 Post-Development

Measure and Improve
Were we successful in our original goals? How can we improve the product or service? We use data to help us answer these questions, and our skills and guts to guide us toward better solutions in the future. To guarantee stable work and relevancy lasting after solution deployment, we deliver maintenance and support services.

Monitoring and Maintenance
Keeping your product in top shape with block-of-time support contracts so we can respond quickly to your needs. Uptime and error monitoring ensures you’ll know about problems before your customers do. As data rolls in, we can be on-hand for changes or maintenance. When you’re ready to make some changes—even small tweaks—Rivet Hammer is here to help. We offer chunk-of-time support contracts; you’ll only pay us for the work we do, and you don’t have to negotiate an agreement or secure funding for every 2-hour task.

Planning for the Future
Launching your first release is really just the beginning. There’s a lot to learn: How are people using the product? What else would they like to see it do? We can help you make sense of all this feedback and lay out a plan for future releases.

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Rivet Hammer is a wholly owned subsidiary of BluCapp, Inc.