“Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?”

--Anonymous

At Sokol Systems we are big believers in the Agile development principals. Our motto - Quality must be built in, it cannot be added on. This philosophy helped us avoid many mistakes that would lead us to over-architect and under-deliver. From day one, we focused on delivering working software in small increments, growing the product and evolving the architecture, as we experimented and discovered.

We did not adopt agile because it seems like another industry “fad” and gets people’s attention today. We are convinced that these principals naturally helped us avoid many common mistakes. For example, we knew that if we attempt a “central architecture” driven design, this would result in over engineered, slow performing system. Even today, with so many different options available, many organizations still postulate the same 15-20 years old software design principals of must-have horizontal scalability and mandatory data centric design with traditional Relational Database Management Systems at the core of the system. At Sokol Systems our only commitment is to the most performing solution and built-in quality. With the open mind, we go where our experimental research takes us.

From day one we decided to adhere to Agile software development principles – use Specification By Example to capture user requirements; use automated testing framework to express our use cases through the interaction with the Asset Record engine; use Test Driven Development (TDD) to "drive" software development, as well as provide a vast safety net for future code changes, with over 90% code coverage; our software is continuously built and inspected by the software quality and test coverage tools. The product will be as good as the “ingredients” you use to build it. We selected only highest quality Open Source modern frameworks to satisfy our needs. Our internal data exchange router and the persistent data store, are top notch frameworks deployed at many successful venues.