Our Development Process

Our Development Approach

At Sicon we take the development of our products very seriously. With many hundreds of organisations and many thousands of users relying on them on a daily basis it is essential that they are up to the job.

The Development Process

The majority of the products now evolve in a 3 month cycle.

At the start of the cylce we will review the wish list and known issues and prioritise these into the work plan for the development phase. In adition to this we often have entirely new features that are being added to the products. These will generally be included in the new features section ahead of time.

At the end of the development cycle the products are fully tested, fully documented onto the on-line web help and user guides before being officially released as a new version.

Flexibility

During the 3 month cylce (between official release versions) there will be beta copy versions available to business partners and clients who wish to use new features early. These versions will not have documentation for the new features and will not go through the full testing process until the end of the development cycle but will be suitable for demonstration / review purposes.

Documentation

All product documentation will be made available on the Sicon Help & User Guide web site. This will become the on-line help for all products as they go through the next development cycle.

This area will include installation instructions, things to think about before starting to implement the product and helpful hint and tips to get the most from the products. These product guides will be updated with each development cycle which may result in users of older versions seeing newer user guides.

To make this clear there will be a release note section explaining what new features have been added in each version so that users can identify if an upgrade is required or if the missing item is an option setting issue.

Known Issues

We will share known issues with our business partners and clients so that if you come across a problem you can quickly see if we are already aware of it and when it will be dealt with.

Release Notes

The release notes are generally a bit 'techie' but they include a list of what fixes are included in each new release of the software. New features and functionality may also be included in this list.

Wish List & New Features

The wish list and new features will hold the full list of new features and changes requested by customers or planned by Sicon that we are considering adding to the product. We hope to add voting to this section so that we can gain some feedback on which items are most popular and useful to clients.

Forum

Our web site platform (intergage) allows us to run a forum and we hope to put this in place during 2010 for the major products.

Software

Hardware & Networks

Sicon Products

Sage Awards - 2009