Method / From Discovery to Production
From discovery to production, one verifiable gate at a time.
No magic phases, no black-box sprints. Our process is a sequence of gates, each with explicit exit criteria you can inspect. It is the same discipline we apply to payment platforms and port systems, applied to the project itself.
DISCOVERY ─► SPECIFICATION ─► FOUNDATIONS ─► BUILD ─► HARDENING ─► PRODUCTION
every gate has exit criteria. no phase gets skipped because the demo looked good.
Sec. 01 / The Phases
Six phases. Nothing implicit.
- PH-01
Discovery
We immerse in your operation: the regulated process, the data flows, and the people who run them every day. We define the problem in writing and agree on what success means before anything gets built. If the honest answer is that you don’t need us, that is the deliverable.
exit / problem statement approved · success criteria agreed
- PH-02
Specification
We write the spec before the code: domain model, state machines, API contracts, security and compliance requirements, and architecture decisions with their trade-offs on record. It is far cheaper to argue over a document than over a deployed system.
exit / spec reviewed with your team · risks and decisions on record
- PH-03
Foundations
Accounts, networks, pipelines and observability come first, as code. From the first weeks there is an environment where every change deploys automatically and nothing is built by hand. Boring on purpose: this is what makes everything after it fast.
exit / CI/CD live · environments reproducible from code
- PH-04
Build
We build in vertical slices that reach a production-like environment early. Contract tests protect every integration, and provider simulators let us exercise the ugly cases (timeouts, duplicates, out-of-order events) long before go-live. You see working software every week, not a slide about it.
exit / features complete against spec · integration and contract tests green
- PH-05
Hardening
Before production we rehearse failure: resilience testing, security review, performance under load, and operational runbooks for the people on call. If it can break, we want to watch it break in staging first.
exit / failure drills passed · security review closed · runbooks written
- PH-06
Production & handoff
We deploy gradually, watch the metrics that matter and stay until the system is boring. Then we hand over the keys: documentation, training, and a team (yours) that can run and evolve it without us. Ongoing support is an option, never a dependency.
exit / stable in production · your team operating it
Sec. 02 / Ground Rules
What stays true in every phase.
- GR-01
You can always see the state of the project. Working software, open boards and honest status. Bad news travels first.
- GR-02
Scope is negotiated, quality is not. When time is short we cut features, never tests, security or traceability.
- GR-03
Everything is written down. Decisions, trade-offs and runbooks live in the repository, so the project survives any single person, including us.
Want to see it applied to your problem?
In thirty minutes we can sketch how this process would look for your payments, compliance or port operations challenge.
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