Agile Development

The best description of Agile Programming practices comes from the Agile Manifesto, which summaries the values agile programming emphasizes:

• “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.” (Agile Manifesto, 2001)

The items in the image on the left are each equally critical to CoVal. CoVal strives to maintain a team of highly dedicated and and motivated individuals that collaborate with customers throughout the software development process.

The continuous development cycle CoVal employs allows not only for continuous feedback from our customers, but quick implementation of that feedback in the end product. By rapidly developing software and delivering it in weeks (or days/hours) rather than months, it allows much closer interaction with our clients and faster response times to unforeseen changes.

CoVal coding philosophy includes a deep understating of the value Object Oriented design brings. CoVal has implemented this concept into Foundation II (and our other products), allowing our programmers to focus on the subject of the application (data) rather than being overwhelmed by the application itself. CoVal has designed its ITS from the ground up to utilize this approach; this results in systems that are not only incredibly robust but also flexible and easy to use when integrating new items.

Our design philosophy has three main advantages:

• Short-Term Development Schedule: With the object model being written previously, the turn-around from specification to working system is incredibly fast.
• Long-Term Insurance:  As all CoVal installations use the Object Oriented model of design, as it evolves, prior systems are not left unsupported. Object Oriented software allows for additions while maintaining backwards compatibility. Therefore, as the Object Model grows, your already-installed system can grow with it.
• Reliability: Most of the Object Model has been written and reliably tested, leading to shorter debugging cycles and an overall higher level of confidence in the software.