FAQ - cayugasoft.com

Company

What are your locations of presence?

Our HQ is in Scarsdale, New York. Cayugasoft also has a representative office in Spain, and two R&D offices in Eastern Europe: Ukraine and Belarus.

Company

How big is your team?

Our team is 70+ people now, consisting of BAs/PMs, Scrum Masters, Tech Leads, Mobile/Web Developers, Quality Assurance Engineers, UI/UX Designers and Marketers. The past year was a key period for our team, as we experienced over 28% growth.

Company

Who is your target customer?

Our customers are typically Tech Leads, Founders and CTOs of small and mid-sized Enterprises who need help expanding their technology development capabilities. Experience in building tech teams allow us to ramp up a new team (up to 5 devs) and produce your first new releasable features in as short as 2 months!

The other side of our expertise is a “soup-to-nuts” product development approach, which is a perfect solution for Startups, or existing businesses who want to scale via a digital transformation or outsource a project. Out team of BAs, Product Managers and Designers visualize your solution first, and test it with alpha user groups, engaging our engineers to code it after.

Company

What is Cayugasoft Company structure?

Cayugasoft has several departments: Development & Testing, DevOps, Product & Design, Management and Customer Care.

Company

What is the average duration of your projects?

Our ideal project that one which lasts for 6+ months, This allows us to understand the client’s business domain, and produce great results. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t work with projects which are 2-3 months in length, or just provide some key staff augmentation resources for your existing team.

Experience

How long have you been in business?

We’ve been in the custom software development business for about 8 years, setting up and managing distributed tech teams, consulting and developing web and mobile solutions for startups and Enterprises like ECM (document management), EHR (electronic health records) systems and B2B/B2C marketplaces.

Experience

How do you handle timezone difference issue if there is any?

Cayugasoft Clients are mostly from US and Europe. R&D teams don’t have timezone issues with the EU. With Clients from East Coast US, we try to organize our work so that there is about 4-5 hours of overlap.

Experience

Do you have any awards in your industry?

Cayugasoft Technologies is proud to be recognized as a top mobile developer in 2018 by Clutch.co (an IT research, rating and reviews Company).

Experience

Can your staff speak English fluently?

Good language skills are a must for all mid and senior-level developers to join our team. To improve their skills, our staff attend in-house English training so they can easily participate in conversations and collaboration with your team.

Experience

What are the technologies you work with?

The team has a deep experience with a variety of web and mobile technologies. Web: ASP.Net, PHP, Python, Node JS, Angular JS, Laravel, React JS; mobile both native (Objective C, Swift, Java) and cross platform (React Native, Xamarin); databases: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL.

Services

How can you make sure the team will deliver quality work?

To make sure features work as expected, Cayugasoft provides Quality Assurance Engineers who can create Acceptance Criteria and run different types of testing: Functional, Regression, Smoke, Load etc. against them. This is an excellent value and while some clients are sometimes tempted to give this minimal attention, we strongly recommend an appropriate level of QA involvement.

Services

Workload can rise and fall during the course of development a project. How can you handle it?

We understand that Business requirements and priorities may change quite rapidly and we can flexibly to ramp up and down the team (depending on the team size you may need to provide 1 month’s notice).

Services

If I have only a product idea can you visualize it for me?

Yes, we can! Our Product team uses a Lean Startup approach, and we can guide you through all stages of a product development starting from the idea validation, analysis, design, development and releasing a minimum viable product (MVP).

Services

Do you provide support services after the end of an active project development phase?

Yes, we can sign SLA agreement and when the active development of the project ends we build a support team who will handle bug fixes and small enhancement requests (e.g. updating the app for upcoming OS release).

Services

Will you work with me if my project is in Support & Maintenance phase now?

We will start with code analysis phase, after which we will be able to fix bugs and do small enhancements quite fast, while meanwhile assisting you to prioritize your next features for development.

Start Work

What do we need to start with to launch a tech team?

First we evaluate the client’s team and skill-set requirements, understand timing and ramp-up requirements. Starting a new project also requires temporal increase of your involvement. Are you ready to invest your time or you can assign a Tech Lead from your side who can handle it for you.

Start Work

What is your hiring process?

When requirements analysis phase is done, this info is passed to our internal and external recruiters, who start providing the first CVs within 2-3 days. All candidates undergo hard skills and soft skills tests, including an English level test. Finally the Client receives several candidates, and can approve the top ones who will join the team.

Start Work

How much time do you need to set up a tech team?

We need 3 weeks to set up a tech team of 2-3 mid-level developers. The timeline depends on a tech stack, professional level required and your availability for the final interview if needed.

Start Work

How long does it take to onboard a new tech person?

Onboarding usually takes up to one week. Key items on the checklist include company procedures, processes and tools; We work with the Client to prepare all needed access credentials and information in advance.

Start Work

How can we start a team if I don’t have a lot of time to manage it?

A team’s success is a function of Cayugasoft’s effectiveness and your involvement. At the beginning of any project, your involvement naturally will be higher, e.g., approve candidates, help us to create an onboarding checklist, explain business and tech goals, create/approve tech specs. Once the team has run through a number of successful iterations, your involvement gradually decreases. In case you can’t personally invest much time into working with the dev team, you should find somebody on your end who will be the main point of contact on daily basis. Additionally, adding an offshore Project Manager is an excellent value. The PM ensures all staff members are making progress and are focused on your top priority tasks.

Work Process

How do you manage projects?

We use several approaches to project management in Cayugasoft. The first is Agile where we provide Scrum Masters and Product Owners to deal with specs and stakeholders, we use the Atlassian products JIRA+Confluence for task management and documentation. In case the client prefers to provide their own project manager, we provide an Account Manager who helps to set up the team, and is the main point of contact for the client.

Work Process

How do you organize Communication with the client?

For communication we use Slack and email, or any other messaging tool which is adopted by the client’s team. Depending on the agreement with the client’s team, we organize Agile “ceremonies”: daily stand ups, retrospectives, planning and sprint reviews, apart from standard calls we set up a weekly call with the C-level management who is responsible for the project, to detect issues and exchange feedback about the effectiveness of collaboration of the two teams.

Work Process

What is the structure of a typical tech team?

A tech team usually consists of a number of developers and testers, a Tech Lead and a Scrum Master. In case we are responsible for delivering a product strategy and requirements, our Product team is also involved: Product Owner, BA, UI/UX designer.

Work Process

How do you apply Agile in daily work?

We love to organize our work with Agile, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t customize to meet the client’s needs. Depending on the whole team’s maturity (including client team members), the release schedule and the work phase, we choose between Sprint and Kanban approaches. Scrum ceremonies are mandatory in each case, together with Story Points estimation.

Value Proposition

What is your Statement of Value?

Cayugasoft Team helps Tech Leaders to concentrate on strategy by offloading the worries of day-to-day software development and delivery.

Value Proposition

How do you differ from your competitors?

We know how to balance taking instructions from our clients, with pushing back in order to provide you with the best results and within a reasonable time.