Across all the services that GrapeCity provides, we are guided by two principles:

• First, our focus on our customers means that we provide personalized services, tailored to each customer's specific needs. 

• Second, our zero-defects philosophy means that we follow rigorous quality-assurance procedures, so we can catch and fix any problems early on in the process. 

Both principles are embodied in our Shinkansen Process Framework. 

Named after Japan's Shinkansen bullet train, famous for efficiently getting people to their destinations, GrapeCity's Shinkansen Process Framework is a collection of best practices for timely, efficient delivery of software solutions and services. We start every engagement by developing an in-depth understanding of our customer's needs. Then we select the specific methodology that is best suited to meeting those needs. Once a project is under way, we stay in close touch with our customers through regular communication and weekly reports. 

In addition, we deliberately limit the number of concurrent projects that we take on, in order to make sure we can fully meet each customer's needs. From the president on down, our management is involved in every project, reviewing weekly reports to make sure that customers' needs are being met. We also use these weekly reports as part of a continuous improvement process, learning from each project to make the next project run even more smoothly.

We apply the Shinkansen Process Framework not only to the work we do for our customers, but also internally, within our own development organization, to create distributed development teams. By enabling us to build virtual development teams, deploying resources across a variety of locations based on skill and business need, the Shinkansen Process Framework provides us with a high degree of flexibility and helps us make the most efficient use of our resources.

Some of the software development best practices embodied in the Shinkansen Process Framework include:

• Choosing the life-cycle model that best fits the project and the customer's needs (e.g., waterfall, modified waterfall, evolutionary, agile lifecycle), rather than being locked into a particular methodology.
   

• Evolutionary prototyping, an approach that enables us to obtain customer feedback early in the process and aggressively attack technological risks.
   

• Managing risk proactively, assessing and attacking risks and communicating them to project stakeholders before problems get to the point where they might threaten the project.
   

• Performing daily "build and smoke" tests to catch any potential problems early on. This approach not only results in a higher quality final product, but also reduces development time, as it takes less time to fix bugs early in the process than to let them seep into the design and development and then fix them.
   

• Conducting regular peer reviews to make sure the code fully complies with our standards.
  

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