Custom software development

Scope is the main driver: how many user roles, workflows and screens, how many systems the software must connect to, and how strict the security, audit and availability needs are. The state of your data and the number of people who must approve decisions matter too. We estimate after discovery, from a prioritised backlog, so you can choose what goes into the first release and what waits.

It depends on the scope of the first release, the integrations it needs and how quickly decisions are made on your side. We prefer a small first release that real users can work with, followed by regular increments, over a long build with a single launch at the end. After discovery we give you a release plan, and we report progress against it at every demonstration.

We start from what your team can run and hire for, what your other systems use, and what the software must do. For most business software that means a mainstream language such as TypeScript, Java, C# or Python, a relational database such as PostgreSQL or SQL Server, and the cloud you already use. We avoid niche tools unless they solve a real problem, and we record each choice and its reasons.

Yes. Many clients want their engineers in the same repository from the start, so knowledge stays in-house. We agree the working rules together: code review, branching, the definition of done and who approves releases. Your engineers can join the iterations, pair with ours, or take over parts of the system when they are ready.

Every change is reviewed by another engineer and covered by automated tests before it is merged. QA tests each increment against its acceptance criteria, and you see it working at the demonstration. Performance, security and accessibility checks are part of the pipeline, not a phase at the end, so problems surface while they are still cheap to fix.

They usually do, and the process expects it. The backlog is reviewed with you at every iteration, and new or changed items are estimated and prioritised against the rest. On a fixed-scope project, a change is agreed in writing, with its effect on cost and dates, before work on it begins.

You choose. We can support and extend the system under an agreement that sets out response times, monitoring and a budget for changes, or we hand it over to your team with the code, the documentation and a period of overlap. Many clients start with our support and move the work in-house over time.

Intellectual property in the work we build for you is yours from the first commit — no assignment step at the end. That covers the custom code, documentation and other deliverables made for you. Anything we bring that existed before, such as internal tools or libraries, stays ours, and you receive a licence to use it in your systems. Open-source components keep their own licences, and we list them for you.

Access is granted per person, limited to what each role needs, and removed when that person leaves the project. We work in your repositories and environments if you prefer, use multi-factor authentication, and keep secrets in a vault, never in code. Code is reviewed before it is merged, dependencies are scanned, and production data is not copied into test environments without masking. We agree these controls with your security team at the start.