We offer a completely independent and honest software product evaluation. Unlike many vendors or suppliers who would get affiliate fees for ensuring a client picks a specific product, we proud ourselves for providing you with solid and decent advice about what steps you should take to make sure you pick the right product for your specific needs.

This means in most cases a  thorough technical evaluation of the various products, not just a snazzy PowerPoint presentation or a chat between two directors over a glass of Chardonnay.

It sounds harsh, but the reality is, software suppliers that are pushing a specific product will promise you heaven and earth and convince you their product will meet your every need. Once the deal is sealed, a lot of options seemingly to be available out-of-the box end up becoming expensive customisations.

Equally, in most cases you need to purchase a product before you and your technical team have had a chance to evaluate it against your specific scenario. We can advise you how to make sure you end up with software that suits your needs.

Another area of expertise we can help you with, is the setup of the development team. Key areas we focus on are: source control, versioning, branching and merging of source code trees, continous integration, unit testing/TDD, peer code reviews, bug/task tracking, Agile/SCRUM methodologies, application and database deployment and release management.

Most of these concepts are about making sure to automate as much as possible thus reducing or avoiding duplication of effort and assuring quality by removing manual processes in the development lifecycle where possible. This is also referred to as the DRY principle, a core principle in the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.

Zealand IT offers solution architecture reviews and makes appropriate and practical recommendations for ways to improve your application security and solution architecture, making it more scalable and maintainable.

These reviews can be performed at various levels and can take place at a high application architecture level but drill down to lower levels such as code reviews to find potential bottlenecks.

Various intrumentation tools and techniques can be used to determine vulnerable areas of the application.

We can help you at any stage of the project lifecycle. From requirements gathering, analysis and design, database modelling and development, through to application development and actual deployment, configuration and maintenance procedures.

More information about our software development practices can be found in the Software Development section.