Benefit: We are able to offer higher quality and more maintainable software.

Chillisoft focuses on the software development of custom applications as its main business. Ancillary to that we offer services such as business analysis, consulting and training, but our main focus is software development. This is where our passion lies, and this is the area we choose to excel in.
We keep current with trends in the development industry, purchase and read books on software development, attend software development conferences, hold training sessions and wholeheartedly strive to improve our skills and the skills of our developers.

We also selectively employ people who have the same passion for development and for improving their skills that we have, and are thus able to grow our skills as a team.

The model that we most frequently employ is custom software development on a fixed price basis. This model was deliberately chosen so that we are forced to learn how to develop what the user wants quickly, whilst ensuring that the software is robust and bug free.

Benefit: We are able to offer higher continuity and thus a higher level of support.

Chillisoft has always prided itself in maintaining a positive culture that challenges and nurtures software developers. It is well known in the industry that if developers find themselves in a support role for an extended period of time, they rapidly become unhappy and are likely to change environments so that they are able to develop new software again. Chillisoft has circumvented this to some extent by using modern technology (such as .NET) and developing projects within different sectors and complexities. Most significantly, we have attempted to minimize the amount of support that is needed for a system after it is implemented.

By utilising a team based approach to software development we ensure that the senior developers tackle more interesting work and the more interesting aspects of the projects, while the junior developers carry out the more routine components. This ensures that the developers are utilised to the maximum capacity thereby providing the customer with the lowest cost solution available and greater depth in support.
In essence it is important to note that we are not a body shop – i.e. we do not place developers on site, with no supervision, accountability or cognisance of the criticality of a system or client's business. Our developers are trained, highly skilled and accountable.

Benefit: We are able to offer a higher skill set, and better standardisation of development. We are also able to offer a path into the future with our extensive experience in .NET technologies.

All development projects written by Chillisoft in the past three years have been written in either Visual Basic .NET or C#, and we are able to develop in either of these languages, depending on the customer's requirements.
We also made a strategic decision to transition old projects (developed in VB6) onto Microsoft's new platform - .NET. The reasons for this decision were:

• It holds many advantages over Visual Basic 6 in productivity and power. It is fully Object-Oriented and doesn't have the inherent restrictions that VB6 has.
• It is Microsoft's platform for the future. Microsoft had already noted that they were ending support for Visual Basic 6 in the near future.
  
• Since adopting .NET, our reusable body of code has been totally rewritten to take advantage of .Net and is now a powerful, useable and maintainable toolset called Habanero.
  

We also use current industry leading software development methodologies such as Test Driven Development, Agile Development and Peer-Programming.

Benefit: We are able to offer excellent tools that improve productivity and software stability, many times over. We are also able to offer a platform for the future in our .NET Architecture.

Habanero sets up new projects with everything that is needed to use Test-Driven Development. Each application uses reusable components that have been used in many different projects and are proven to be very stable. The reuse decreases the bug-count of systems we develop.

Our Habanero standardises the manner in which applications are developed and increases the speed of development, while also improving the quality of the written software. Habanero makes it easier for a developer to move from another language to .NET, as it allows him/her to be more productive quicker, since it automates much of the 'plumbing' required by every business application. Thus, a developer who is new to the language doesn't need to learn as much of the huge .NET class library before being able to build applications. Habanero enables this because database mapping, logic, rules and the user interface are defined in XML, and are both readable and understandable to any developer.

Benefit: We are able to offer a greater level of standardisation in software development. This improves the maintainability of the software immensely.

It is important for development to be standardised, in style, quality and architecture. This helps immensely in maintaining systems, as people are able to navigate code written by others easily if they conform to the same style.

Our standardised methodology is applied to every application, consisting of User Interface, Business Object, and Logic layers. The Logic layer is where all the business logic resides, and automated tests must be written to test this code. These automated tests ensure that changes made to an application do not break any already existing functionality. They also provide a method of documentation within the code, (i.e. because they test business logic it is possible to look at the tests to see the business logic at work within the application).