Alex Favorov - "Forma-Pro web development company, PHP5/OOP/Agile/Symfony/Design/Logo - Forma-Pro Project Manager, Ukraine"

My name is Alex Favorov, I'm 30 and I am the president of this company. The company has been being on the market for 7 years, though my personal experience as a software and web developer a lot bigger. I'm in charge for projects management; I'm also responsible for communication with clients and other managing items We have a team of 15 highly qualified programmers 23-30 years old. All they have bachelor or master degrees, some of them are PhD. Most of the projects we had worked on were...

My name is Alex Favorov, I'm 30 and I am the president of this company. The company has been being on the market for 7 years, though my personal experience as a software and web developer a lot bigger. I'm in charge for projects management; I'm also responsible for communication with clients and other managing items

We have a team of 15 highly qualified programmers 23-30 years old. All they have bachelor or master degrees, some of them are PhD.

Most of the projects we had worked on were done with PHP/MySQL. We are not limited with this area only, we also deal with similar fields like Perl or JSP. Besides we develop a unique design, customers support, server maintains, etc

Since the company establishment our team has made more than 100 projects, beginning with small size to huge projects which took some years for a group of programmers.

Most of our customers are from the USA, we have also clients from Holland, Germany, England and Australia.

Though IT-market is developing quickly and you can make good money on electronic commerce, our team is concerned with some negative trend in web development. There is a huge amount of unsupportable code over the internet. Actually the code can not be totally bad. Usually it's good enough for the person who wrote it and it's completely unsupportable for anybody other. First thing a project owner hears from a new team is the proposal to rewrite the code from scratch. So that the project owner becomes dependent on the team that developed the software.

We believe it's possible to write the code which can be supported by other programmers. Below are our approaches how to make project successful beginning from idea to implementation and from launch to maintenance and support. It covers all steps of the product life cycle: development, communication, etc. I hope this text will allows you to get to know us better and it'll help you to take a decision about future cooperation with our team. 

1. Code requirements
   • Code should be written according to the coding standards.
   • OOP should be used. It allows to reuse the code, task distribution between entities. Also it allows to test every entity and the whole application.
   • Design Patterns should be used when appropriate.
   • Implementation of different entities should be logically separated. Patterns, classes and methods should be used for this.
   • Unit and functional tests should cover as much code as possible. It allows to evaluate efficiency of the project. Also tests are self-documentation of the existing code.

   We use Symfony PHP 5 MVC framework in most of our projects. It allows applying the ideas above the best way. For year 2008 we did more than 20 mid- and large-size various Symfony projects and we think that it's a good enough.

2. Scheme of work

   We prefer using Agile methodology though we realize it maybe not the best for all customers and projects. As an alternative we offer usual scheme:

   • Project discussion (Customer and Manager)
   • Estimates, milestones and deadlines
   • Development according to the milestones
   • Deployment to the customer server
   • Testing
   • Support (bugfix, new feature development, etc)
3. Project management and work flow

   When the project is started we assign a manager from our team. Manager will be responsible for all the communications with the customer and the programmers. Every manager has at least fluent written skills and good verbal skills.

   When the project scope is clear we assign one or several programmers from our team. We try to select those programmers which fit the project the best.

   During the development we use version control (SVN) and bugtrack systems, which ensures that everything is under control.

4. We don't take EVERY projects.

   For us it's extremely important to know that we will provide the perfect results and if we are not sure of that we may refuse such project. What type of projects we usually don't accept:

   • Projects with outdated PHP4 code. Besides all it applies to Drupal, Joomla, etc. We know that many people like it, but we do not.
   • Projects with bad php 5 code. Before taking a project with existing code we need to do code review. After we take the project we'll be responsible for all issues.
   • Projects used a third party service not according to their terms&conditions or violating legal laws (e.g. grabbing google search results, sending spam, etc.)
5. We have experienced system administrator able to maintain *nix or Windows servers and to solve the tasks of any complexity.
6. We do graphic design, logo design and html cut. Our design department can create custom design for your site of any complexity. Adobe Photoshop and CorelDraw are our main designing tools. Our HTML expert can cut off your design according to all w3c standards.

I'm looking forward to working with you!

Alex Favorov,
Forma-pro CEO
alex@forma-pro.com
Skype: lofa__
Yahoo: alex_favorov
ICQ:   55491735

moreless