Development Process

Untold uses advanced software solutions to solve complex technological problems. Solutions are our outputs, not lines of code. We carry ideas through strategy, project planning, development, quality assurance, deployment, and iterative development upon launch.

Quality Code Philosophy

Quality code starts with quality software engineers. The Untold team writes code with high personal standards and, though process lends a hand, the Untold development philosophy starts and ends with great people.

No Offshoring

All Untold developers are full-time employees based in the United States. We don't offshore any parts of our clients' web or mobile projects. If our clients and partners are working with offshore development teams, then the Untold team will happily integrate with them in order to exceed expectations. Though offshoring will likely never be a part of our business model, we understand its value in certain situations and are happy to work alongside teams from any part of the globe.

No Contractors

All Untold developers are full-time employees and part of our family. We don't contract out any parts of a project to anyone we don't want to have onboard full-time. Due to this, our clients and partners experience an abnormal amount of stability from Untold.

Direct Communication

Our clients and partners are not gated from Untold's development team. We encourage direct-to-dev communication to expedite problem solving and facilitate cross-team knowledge transfer. Our engineers are all actual real human beings, and they all care deeply about the work they do and the people they support. We believe wholeheartedly that this practice is one the biggest contributions to our high code quality.

Agile at Kickoff

Ideally, all agreements on Agile Methodology have been determined during the discovery phase. Agile at development kickoff is focused on the details of time and length of daily scrum, sprint windows, sprint planning, and sprint retrospectives. Learn more about Agile at Untold now.

Integrations

Integrating web and mobile systems brings value, efficiency, and transparency across any organization. The Untold team has integrated the newest software frameworks with archaic platforms and databases. It’s rarely simple, but ensuring that organizational technology is interconnected is at the heart of value that Untold brings.

Some integrations are tried and true and others requires hunting and some headphones-on-heads-down detective work. Some of the more common integrations in our world have been for AWS, SpriteKit, ARKit, and PayPal.

API Development

Application programming interface (API) development is part of nearly every mobile and web project at Untold. Custom scripting across a wide variety of languages is what we do. We look forward to helping our clients automate and unite previously scattered workflows, inefficient processes, and manual operations.

We've ingested well-known APIs as well as custom backend APIs with our clients. In the latter, we've often found ways to provide feedback for the best utilization. Just to name a few, we've used Runscope, Postman, Paw, and custom-written integration tests to ensure we're consistently getting what we expect.

In APIs that the Untold team has built ourselves, we take pride in future-proofing features such as versioning, helpful fallbacks, and useful error messaging. When a custom API needs significant scalability, we'll utilize facets of AWS to make that happen.

Migrations

No two code or content migrations are the same. All web and mobile ecosystems are unique, with their own set of complexities. Untold understands the need to ensure legacy functionality and historical content are replatformed smoothly and efficiently.

It's rare that a legacy site got the architecture or content model right on the first try. Frequently, a migration will entail a deep dive into all the pieces, how they're used, and how they could be streamlined. It pays dividends to set the architecture straight, and we enjoy solving that puzzle whenever we're brought into help with a migration project.

Most of our experience has been in Drupal migrations, and we're impressed with the Drupal 8 migration pathway. We also love to see clients benefit from a more stable release and all the performance benefits that come with it.

Code Review

At Untold, all major code work is subject to two levels of Code Review using GitHub Pull Requests. Code is reviewed as it is produced for testing by a senior member of the Untold team and any stakeholders who wish to be included.

Additionally, as a new feature is being developed, a targeted and contextual quality assurance review by a producer/strategist/project manager ensures all code is of the highest possible quality.

It's safe to say we're picky. It's common to have multiple constructive and laudatory comments per pull request. We hold ourselves to a high bar, and framework and language coding standards matter.

Mobile Continuous Integration

Untold mobile apps let fastlane handle the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of continuous integration (CI).

As such, we tend to be agnostic when it comes to traditional CI tools. We keep a Jenkins server running as a default option, but we’re also happy to work with Travis CI, CircleCI, or whatever internal tool our clients and partners prefer.

Package Managers

On iOS, deciding on a package manager requires nuance. Th Untold team has used both Carthage and CocoaPods and, while we’re comfortable with both, we typically opt for CocoaPods as it requires less manual setup to integrate with projects. We’re also keeping a close eye on Swift Package Manager. While it doesn’t quite feel ready at this moment, we’re confident it will soon be the best way to manage third9party code inside an iOS app.

For Android, we use Gradle for dependency management. It's straightforward, and very well integrated with Android Studio.

Optimizing For First-Party Code

By computer programming standards, mobile development is still relatively new. As an industry, we’ve had a couple decades to stabilize the platforms and tooling around web development (particularly on the backend), but Swift and Kotlin are both still in their infancy (as are iOS and Android as platforms, to a lesser extent).

As such, the Untold team encourages caution before adding third-party dependancies to mobile projects. That's not to say we won't take on a dependency if we find the right fit, but relying as much as possible on our code and the first-party code from Apple and Google is a surefire way to keep our clients' and partners' software reliable and maintainable.

Training Documentation

Well before launch, the Untold team assembles the requirements for all necessary documentation. Whether the format is a README file, technical data sheets, or line-by-line instruction files, the Untold team delivers documentation in the way that most benefits our clients’ internal development staff moving forward.

In cases where there's a content team that needs user-interface guidance, the Untold team often creates step-by-step guides to empower their admin experience; and when a new feature is implemented, we hop to training these content teams up as soon as it's ready for launch.