Drupal development

Drupal is an enterprise-grade, open source CMS that’s highly maintained and secure, with over a million community contributors globally and strong worldwide adoption with over 500,000 websites. It’s also won several international open source CMS awards and is used by many leading private organisations, governments, not-for-profits and academia including IBM, Pfizer, Unicef, and Paramount.

Our methodology

Salsa has 12+ years of experience in developing and delivering simple to large and complex open source projects and solutions. Using this experience and knowledge Salsa has developed a scalable project delivery framework to ensure a high quality, consistent and predictable project delivery. The blueprint is adjusted and right-sized to each project for maximum efficiency.

Key aspects of this approach are:

1. An Intake and preparation phase that involves preparing for a kickoff meeting, provisioning your site, and validating site features. The end of this phase will conclude with a kickoff meeting, as well as delivery of a project plan.
2. The Discovery and design phase will validate the content and features to be hosted from supplied assets. Those features which are custom will be discussed and fully understood with agreed implementation paths. Features which are out of the box CivicTheme or low complexity adaptations will be cross checked with the project team.
3. If additional HCD/ UX activities are desired these can be discussed and added and quoted by request. They can also be completed post go-live as continuous iterative improvements to be released under BAU support and enhancements.
4. The Planning and onboarding phase will set up the development team to assemble the site and finalise agile stories for any new custom features or functions.
5. The Build and assembly phase configures the new site with out-of-the-box features which are styled, adaptations and styling to CivicTheme components where required and building new features or new components. The QA analysts will perform testing and identify any bugs at this stage. These issues will be placed into JIRA for remediation before the UAT stage.
6. The UAT and Content loading phase will load content and support UAT testing. Issues will be remediated as required during this phase.
7. The Go live stage will coordinate the site live process, and deploy the site.
8. The Hypercare stage will provide a provision for active support to investigate, prioritise and remediate issues post go live. This has been provisioned for two weeks and then support is handed over to the Service Desk team under BAU.
9. The BAU stage will onboard site stakeholders to Salsa application support.

An overarching governance stream manages the project end to end. The governance stream will normally include a weekly project report that details key activities and financials, in this case due to the short project we suggest this done per stage, Design, Build, UAT, Go-Live (wrap up).

We also follow an agile project delivery methodology to help drive continuous change and ensure we evolve as the project does. Agile is a collaborative approach that focuses on work across teams (and in our case often between Salsa and our client), with adaptive planning and continuous improvement. Salsa currently has five certified scrum masters on our team.