Black Pepper Software is a long established software development company based in the Uk. We hate waste and strive for right-first-time delivery.

Here’s How -

• Experience matters: all Black Pepper engineers would be “seniors” in the large consultancies (many of us have had these roles in the past).
• Capability matters: whether you believe Ed Yourdon, Fred Brookes or Robert Glass, the difference between the most and least productive software engineers is at least 1:10. We really are choosy about who we hire.
• Teamwork matters : it takes time for project teams to become fully productive, there’s a plethora of models to describe how Group Development happens and how to accelerate it. We use pre-built teams to skip over forming, norming and storming to get to results.
• Finding problems early matters : we’ve all read the books that say problems found in production systems cost up to 1000 times more to fix than if they were fixed earlier in the process. All too often we forget this when planning projects, saving up the most risky activities till the end (integration, testing, & deployment as examples). Then we convince ourselves we are “on-track” because “coding” is 80% complete. Black Pepper tackles risk early by delivering end to end working software in weekly (maybe fortnightly) chunks and focusing on “proving the system works” rather than “finishing the code”.
• Tools and automation matters : there are not many manufacturers that hand craft their products. As an industry software engineers seem slow to automate some particularly error prone and time consuming activities. Enterprise scale, open source tools are routinely available for continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous testing, including user acceptance testing and performance testing.

Well that’s what we think anyway.

You can read more about our views on technology, open source software and agile approaches in our blog.