Engineering Process

GS Lab’s approach to quality is tuned to working predictably with fast moving start-ups. A start-up customer profile needs processes more agile than those normally governed by SEI CMM or ISO standards. As such, GS Lab’s processes and best practices outlined place a significant emphasis on requirements control and quality of the basic output of engineers rather than checks and balances in procedures. It has strengthened its daily build process, iterative development process, and test automation process to the extent that the required quality of the development output is ensured as increasingly complex requirements are met in a controlled fashion.
In addition to these processes, the Company lays significant emphasis on review of estimates, designs, and work products. This ensures that mistakes are caught early in the cycle.

GS Lab’s Process Philosophy

GS Lab has well-defined processes and practices in place so that clients have control over their projects. The transparency maintained by the GS Lab Technical Managers ensures that the customers know status of individual projects with the required precision. GS Lab provides a basic structure for deliveries along the following four aspects of a development process:

  Requirements Control Process
  Build Process
  Development Process
  QA Process

GS Lab’s documentation standards are flexible and are governed by the standards of each customer. A template of sample documents such as requirements document, design document, test plan, and test sheet can be supplied at an appropriate time.

Requirement Control Process

A critical part of working with fast moving remote development organizations is to convert telephonic/email conversations into precise development tasks for engineers. GS Lab ensures that this happens by taking the following steps:
  When a new requirement emerges, the Executive, Technical Manager, and Architect (who together constitute GS Lab’s team Management and are all required to be hands-on) contribute to clarifying the feature and help the understanding for assigned engineer immediately after the requirement is first conveyed.
  The engineer is required to confirm the understanding with a design document/note. The domain understanding and past experience enable follow-on local decision-making to minimize the communication delays related to approvals and clarifications.
  The Technical Manager then follows-up this new requirement to closure through multiple builds and releases, each time making the feature and the related test automation and test plan/coverage more complete.
  GS Lab has developed and deployed mature internal web-based tool called GS Collab, which is made available to our customers, for tracking all items of work, their estimate breakdowns, and completion status. This tool forms the foundation for ensuring that local plans are in sync with the customer’s plans.