Oxagile Reviews
Stephen Forte
1 contributions
4 helpful votes
Have a good exit plan if you engage
What would you change about the experience?
Our goal was to build an MVP of our initial iOS app. We started with a smaller project, focusing on R&D, and our ability to use a required third-party SDK. We reviewed several vendors, including a handful from Minsk. I traveled to Minsk personally to meet with them and other firms. The project is confidential and I cannot get into too much detail, however it did focus on developing an IOS app that was required to connect to some hardware using a third-party SDK. It included audio and video components. Their project management structure and process were quite professional. However, at the end of the day, code quality and yield is all that matters. Had we continued with the project and not canceled, we would have likely been 3x over budget for money and time, for the exact same specification that was quoted initially. I always expect a 20% variance when developing projects using scrum rather than waterfall, but this variance, and continued inability to predict sprint yield was unacceptable. The communication and working with their team was actually quite good. They were responsive with issues and questions, and communicated well. However, their code quality and yield was very poor. The abstraction of code wasn't up to international standard nor our documented standard, and their yield per Sprint was the lowest I've ever seen. It started to feel like a bait and switch using an experienced developer to get us in the door. The initial R&D project was successful, thus we contracted for the larger project. Once in, they assigned another developer in house and don't appear to monitor the coding progress very well… nor did they seem to care or take any responsibility. The early alarm bells rang when we reviewed their legal documentation for engagement, and their legal paperwork was 4x longer than any other competitor. It is always concerning when a service provider seems to be so concerned on collection and protecting themselves with no reciprocal provisions on the quality of their own work... to me, that usually means they had problems in the past with quality or deliverability. In hind sight, we should have stopped there. We also would start to receive late collection emails within 24 hours after the invoice arrived. We paid them all within three business days, and still would have received three or four communications for collection by then. A very annoying and strange behavior. In general, we lost several months and $20,000+ on the engagement. Either iOS Isn't directly in their skill set, or we may have suffered from some sort of aberration. In general, it turned out very disappointing. At the end of project, they offered no regret, no discount, no remorse, and declared no responsibility. They did offer to add an additional developer for a one week sprint, then suggested we double developer hours to accommodate for their poor story point progress doubling my cost. At the end, we had spent significant money on the project, in addition to thousands of dollars traveling to Belarus to meet the team and kick things off. It was a highly disappointing experience and very little of the code was reusable as they did not follow our abstraction requirements. Development shops aren't always a good match for every project, but the attitude and actions of a service provider when things go sideways, are generally the most telling of their character. The best decision we made was to pull our project as fast as we did. Interestingly, after posting a few critical reviews, their "Chief Account Executive" has hounded me daily by email and phone... far more attention than he ever paid when I was a paying customer .. His only message to me when I cancelled the engagement what that I better pay on time and in full ... which I did, honoring my agreement. I suspect they have a disengaged CEO, as even when I was running a $1.2b P&L with 21,000 employees, I called customers daily if issues arose.
Overall Feedback:
I initially found the company very responsive and impressive. They appeared to have very good process, and a professional structure for agile project management. Starting small, we have one developer assigned, plus a part-time scrum master, and part-time QA. We were to expand the team, once we validated the development experience.
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