Engineering
The bar, written down so you can hold us to it.
Specific enough to check against what ships: a definition of done, the practices that hold under deadline pressure, and what triggers a second review.
- Reviewed by a second engineer
- Every changeReviewed by a second engineer
- Documentation updated with the code
- Same changeDocumentation updated with the code
- You own the source
- Day oneYou own the source
Six things, all of them, every time.
“Done” is the most expensive word in software when it is left undefined. This is ours, and it is the same on a two-week spike as on a three-year programme.
Merged to the main branch behind review by someone who did not write it.
Automated tests covering the paths that would hurt most if they broke.
Deployed to a live environment the client can reach, not a demo branch.
Documentation updated in the same change, not scheduled for later.
Observable — logged and monitored well enough to diagnose from a dashboard.
Accepted against criteria agreed before the work started.
How we work
Six practices that survive a deadline.
The test of a standard is whether it holds in the week before a launch. These are the ones that do.
Review by a second engineer
Every change, including ours to our own products. Review is for design and edge cases; formatting and lint are the machine's job and are never a review comment here.
Trunk-based, small changes
Short-lived branches merged often. Long-running branches accumulate conflicts and hide progress, and the merge is always worse than the work it contains.
Tests where they earn their keep
We do not chase a coverage percentage. We test the paths whose failure costs money, the ones that are hard to reason about, and every bug we fix — so it cannot come back quietly.
Architecture decisions recorded
Significant choices written down with the alternatives considered and why they lost. It is what lets a decision be revisited in year three without re-litigating it from memory.
Deploys are boring
Automated, repeatable, reversible, and rehearsed for anything with a cutover. If a release needs a specific person awake at a specific hour, that is a defect in the pipeline.
Dependencies are a liability
Every package added is a thing to patch and a supply-chain surface. We reach for the standard library and the framework first, and audit what remains.
Handover
20 artefacts, 5 phases, all of them yours.
What lands in your repository at the end of each phase. Documentation is a deliverable with a date on it, not something written after the invoice.
Understand
- Problem definition document
- Current-state process maps
- Stakeholder and constraint register
- Opportunity sizing
Define
- Target architecture
- Phased delivery roadmap
- Success metrics and SLAs
- Commercial structure
Build
- Fortnightly releases
- Live environments
- Versioned scope
- Running test suite
Prove
- Security review
- Load and failover report
- UAT sign-off
- Runbooks
Operate
- 24×7 SLA operations
- Quarterly architecture review
- Roadmap cycles
- Handover on request
All of it yours
Every artefact ships with the phase that produces it, signed off like any other deliverable — not written up after the invoice. You keep them whether or not the next phase happens.
Next step
Bring us the problem. We will bring the architecture.
A discovery call takes forty-five minutes. You leave with our read on the problem, the shape of the system we would propose, and a straight answer on whether we are the right team for it.
- No sales deck
- An engineer on the call, not an account manager
- NDA before you share anything