Neomind Labs has grown into a home for wayward software applications, but it hasn’t always been that way. We noticed when other consultancies started to send us their “problem clients,” and they were wonderful customers.
We realized that there was resentment building up between the other shops and the customer because they were staffing it with overtime and whoever was available on the bench. In other words, it was an afterthought, an inconvenience. The consultants felt obligated to try to do something. They couldn’t just say no to their longtime customer and didn’t know what else to do.
In my experience, most consultancies grow to a specific size and realize that long-term part-time customers distract and slow them down on their primary goal of building and shipping new software as quickly and efficiently as possible. Most developers seem to live for this purpose.
Most, but not all. As Corgibytes pointed out in their blog post, there are Makers, and there are Menders. Neomind’s primary focus is on not only mending broken software but improving it. Often before it breaks.
We believe software is a valuable asset, that only gets more valuable as it interacts with the world. All the simple, naive code becomes more complicated with exceptions and edge cases. The problem is, then it gets harder to understand and then harder to change and maintain.
Starting from these understandings, we work to keep software from becoming legacy software, continuously. Part-time, all the time. When it’s time to add features, upgrade, or otherwise improve your application, there’s already a team familiar with the code. Same for when an audit comes up, or a new customer has deeply technical questions years after the original developers moved on.
