Software Development

Newicon is based in Bristol, UK. We also have remote teams. But we are born and bred in Bristol and have our software and design studio in the heart of Bristol city centre. whilst geography is great and we love face to face meetings we have also worked and travelled to see clients in France, Switzerland and USA and more. The digital world knows no bounds.

Software consultancy is a service that we offer you to help you get the best out of your software project. We use our software expertise to consult with you on the best ways forward. We offer consultancy throughout our process. Our team can help with technical aspects of a solution, from migrating into the cloud or scaling the technology. We can also help with developer best practice and solution handovers. Example areas software consultancy can help with are:

1. Software technology selection
2. Software development
3. Software testing
4. Software installation
5. Software maintenance
6. Software customisation
7. Software scalability
8. Software security
9. Software handover and documentation
10. Software API design and architecture
11. Software migrate to cloud and scalability
12. Data strategy warehousing and backup
13. Data insights and discovery
14. Database design
15. Devops: Developer operations, providing documentation, tools and best practices for internal software teams

If you have an idea contact us by our online form, e-mail or phone. You can also book a meeting in with one of our team members. We will set up meeting. It's good to have as much information ready as possible about your idea. On the initial call we will try to get a feel for the project and give a ROM - a (rough order of magnitude) costing - this is just a guess within a range that feels reasonable based on the technical complexity of your idea, from building a brochure website to building the next Facebook or Google!

This really depends on the audience you are targeting and what your app does. Typically mobile apps need to talk to a server or a web app in order to process user log ins or preferences and so there is often a server and web app component. In a perfect world you want your app to work on any preferred platform the user has. Whether they are on their phone, in the browser, on their desktop computer, iPad or on their smart TV. Modern apps today like Slack, and Microsoft teams use Electron.js which is a Node.js (Javascript) tool that enables a web app to run on the desktop as a separate application. The application can then work well on both a website in the users browser or on the desktop through a downloadable application. A similar technique using Cordova or iconic can then also package an application to deliver across smart phone devices. These are then available for download in the various app stores. Progressive web apps also exist that are designed o function in a similar way to mobile apps, once installed they can also be indistinguishable from a native application however it's not possible to install them through an app store. This can be both a blessing and a curse depending on your particular use case.

We consider our role to be educational. There is no "computer says no" here. There is a usually a natural knowledge divide and our job is to bring our software development knowledge and apply that to your unique situation. We must also use your expertise in order to make the solution the best it can be. We have worked with complete technophobes to other software development experts. When there is nothing physical we develop a visual language in the form of a clickable prototype - everyone can collaborate on this and share expertise. Then during the project development progress is measured with working testable software in line with the agile software principles. This allows for all people from diverse background to understand and collaborate on the project.

Scalability depends on the particular solution. You can achieve scalability in many ways using many techniques. We use state of the art hosting across a range of providers. From AWS to Digital Ocean. We have also scaled hardware solutions using Raspberry Pi's. We are able to scale software applications vertically and horizontally. A cloud system that scales horizontally automatically creates new servers and computing power to cope with fluctuating demand. A vertical scaling system typically has fewer servers and scales by increasing the hardware capacity. Both options are valid and make sense depending on the scale. Horizontally scaling solutions increase the potentially for downtime as each new server can fail and therefore requires load balancing, also generally it can cost a lot. However ultimately to achieve massive scale you will need a multi-server horizontal scale approach. This is an area that is exploding in option at the moment with Amazon with AWS, Google and Microsoft with Azure and IBM all entering the market with custom solutions. Whilst some solutions aid rapid initial development and scale the costs of such services also scale and often sometimes not linearly! It can also be very challenging to understand what your monthly hosting charges will be. It is also important to know where your data is stored. If third party services are used in an effort to rapidly enter the market its important to also consider a failover plan and not get locked in to any one provider. Newicon has always championed open source technologies. Open source operating systems and programming languages dominate the cloud internet space. We work with you and factor in the projects specifics to develop a sensible scaling plan.

Whilst we are technology agnostic when taking on projects we have key technologies that serve us well. Typically these are Node.js (Javascript) and PHP and MySQL or MariaDB is our database workhorse. Often there is a confusion between frameworks and core programming languages as the frameworks can sometimes be more popular. For Javascript we prefer to use Vue.js as a framework but we also have projects we maintain based on react, backbone, jQuery and vanilla Javascript. For PHP we typically use a collection of open source packages or Yii or Laravel Then there are applications built on the same technologies (PHP, Javascript, MySQL) such as Wordpress and Magento. As we specialise in understand the core technologies that everything else is built upon we can easily support a wide range of applications built on them. For mobile development we typically use Cordova or Ionic with Vue.js this enables us to build mobile application using web technology and limit the impact from vendor specific changes.

To be technology agnostic means we go in to each new challenge with an open mind and don't shy away from projects because they may have sections written in different languages. Software best practices are applicable to all software no matter the language used. Because Newicon builds lots of new software projects that must integrate seamlessly with legacy systems we encounter many legacy platforms and technologies too, sometimes these are completely bespoke and built by developers several decades ago. The Newicon team is a collection of problem solvers first. We hire people that can solve problems and love to learn. All computer languages are built on the principles of computers. No language can change that and often it's just a matter of syntax. Syntax is something that can be easily learnt if you understand the fundamentals of computing. We believe this so strongly that we have created an academy to try and teach these principles! For new technologies we have not used there might be a lead time for us to learn and understand how it works, this lead time is considered in our proposals and often not charged to our customers. Newicon is confident in a wide range of open source software technologies, Newicon’s software developers are expert problem solvers and comfortable with both traditional and new solutions to solve highly unique business challenges. The important thing is that we choose the right technology for your specific problem and business objectives. We can analyse the pros and cons of various technical approaches and manage the risks each technology provides.

The typical deliverables is a working app and the source code. This will also include the logins to various services you need. We do provide technical support and hosting services should your application need it, but you have full access to the source code and any assets needed - its yours to do with as you want. We have helped people take on internal teams and onboard them with code we have developed we have also taken on projects from companies that have an overworked internal team.

We break most software projects into two major phases - and architecture design phase and a software development phase. Our software development phase further breaks the project down into small units of work called sprints. Each sprint delivers a testable working subset of the final project that can be tested by everyone involved. Feedback at these stages is welcomed. We have written a more detailed guide on our software development process that can be read here

During our design architecture phase we develop complete working high fidelity clickable prototypes that feel as close to the finished app as possible. We break all projects down into small deliverable chunks of working software that can be tested throughout the process.