How We Improve Clients’ Development Processes

For enterprises and mature startups, a great practice is using TOGAF’s ADM to assess how architecture meets both current needs and future growth. This alignment leads to IT solutions that truly make an impact and drive measurable business outcomes. We also take advantage of TOGAF’s Enterprise Continuum to organize and reuse architecture assets, reducing complexity and streamlining new developments. When it comes to executing IT modernization and strategic initiatives, we use TOGAF’s business architecture and transformation readiness assessments to identify potential risks early and minimize disruptions.

Architecture issues are often ignored due to time constraints or a lack of deep architectural expertise. Yet, early, expert-led reviews are critical to preventing costly redesigns and ensuring scalable, high-performance systems. For complex architectures, we recommend regular, in-depth architecture reviews conducted by experienced principal architects. These reviews should be embedded throughout the development lifecycle — at key design stages, during critical implementations, and before scaling decisions — to identify risks early and keep systems future-proof.

Project transparency is a game-changer for development teams struggling with unclear ownership, misaligned priorities, long dependency wait times, and slow decision-making. We implement best practices that bring clarity and accountability at every level, ensuring alignment across engineers, business stakeholders, and project sponsors. Our approach includes using RACI to define roles and responsibilities, conducting regular status updates, holding cross-functional reviews, setting clear milestones with measurable outcomes, and leveraging focused visual project boards to track progress in real time. We also establish lightweight yet effective processes for documenting and tracking key decisions, managing dependencies, reviewing pull requests, and maintaining continuous alignment.

In large-scale Agile projects, teams without efficient CI/CD often end up firefighting rather than delivering value. We implement comprehensive CI/CD pipelines that automate builds, tests, security and compliance checks, deployments, and monitoring. Our CI/CD processes help to achieve a 30–50% reduction in release time, a 40–60% decrease in post-release bugs, and an 80–90% reduction in production incidents. By combining CI/CD with efficient Agile practices, we can enable multiple daily deployments and a less-than-an-hour MTTR, with a deployment failure rate below 5%.

Strategic test automation helps maintain high software quality while speeding up release cycles. We typically automate regression, integration, cross-browser, performance, and smoke tests — these areas lend themselves well to automation and significantly accelerate the testing process. For example, in a recent project, we implemented an automated suite of end-to-end UI smoke tests, covering 56% of the system’s functionality. These tests ran in just 7 minutes, compared to the 12 hours needed for manual testing, which drastically reduced the time required for new releases. Manual testing is reserved for areas that benefit from human expertise, such as exploratory testing and evaluating user experience (UX). Also, we use manual tests for one-time checks after hotfixes, where automation is not cost-effective.

Technical debt can slow down feature development, increase maintenance costs, and frustrate developers. Yet, addressing technical debt often takes a backseat to shipping new features. Our solution is building an efficient system to track, prioritize, and resolve technical debt incrementally. To ensure transparency and focus, we use tools like SonarQube for real-time tracking and implement a structured debt register to categorize and prioritize issues based on effort and impact. By quantifying technical debt’s effect on performance, costs, and scalability, we can clearly identify where and why it matters. To maintain momentum without disrupting delivery, we integrate technical debt reduction into sprint planning and introduce lightweight practices like "Debt-Free Fridays" for focused, incremental progress.

Many development teams struggle with balancing speed and thoroughness, leading to either rushed reviews that miss critical flaws or lengthy ones that slow delivery. We address this by implementing time-boxed reviews that focus on broader code health rather than just line-by-line corrections.

To prevent reviews from becoming a bottleneck or a source of tension, we foster a culture of constructive feedback and knowledge sharing through pair programming, walkthroughs, and shared design sessions. This not only strengthens code quality but also improves team alignment.

Many Agile development teams either skip retrospectives or treat them as repetitive complaint sessions, missing the opportunity to refine workflows and boost morale. Following Scrum best practices, we introduce structured yet engaging formats like “Start-Stop-Continue,” timeline mapping, and even gamified approaches that keep discussions productive and focused on solutions. We also ensure that every retrospective leads to clear, trackable improvements by integrating action items directly into sprint planning, assigning ownership, and following up on progress.