What does "Custom Software" really mean? Simply put, we build whatever you need to help your business digitally - be it a mobile app or a web-based platform.
You may be here looking for:
- iOS and/or Android applications for your mobile workforce
- A job management system to help track work from quote to completion
- A finance system to manage incoming and outgoing payments and reconciliation
- Integrations that make one piece of software talk to another
- An HR platform to manage staff onboarding, training, and retention
- A live data dashboard to give you an overview of your company
You might need help with:
- E-commerce, whether it’s what the customer sees or how you manage it
- Distribution, digital or physical
- Logistics, such as inventory management
- Scheduling, making sure all jobs are done in the right order
…or perhaps something else entirely.
The good news is that you’re in the right place. You can come to us with any problem and we will find a solution. It’s what we love to do. Everything we build should create meaningful change for you.
Our process is at the core of what we do
We work using Agile Scrum methodology, which means we plan our work as small, bitesize tasks. We allocate these tasks to a two-week period of work. Every fortnight, we meet you to show progress, get your feedback, and prioritise the next tasks.
It’s a very common method of software development. We, and our clients, see how its iterative and incremental nature is beneficial, flexible, and gives a quick return on investment.
Our team are all in-house
When you work with Switchplane, you’re not buying a ready-made product. You’re working with a team of highly-skilled developers, all directly employed by us. No outsourcing, no dealing with call centres on the other side of the world, and we're not an agency.
Our company is based in Eastbourne on the south coast of the UK. Since the pandemic, we work at home or in co-working spaces, but we’re the same team working together day in, day out. Every day begins with an online team catch-up.
This means we have tight control of our project management. Our staff stay with you and know your projects. You'll have a dedicated tech lead and familiar faces throughout our partnership.
The tech part
Heads-up, this section uses technical jargon. You don't need to read it - we're just summarising our technical setup for those people that want to know. In summary, we follow best practices in what we do.
We run a custom-built Docker environment based on Apache running within Amazon Linux. We make heavy use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including S3, ECS, RDS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, EC2, CloudFront, CodeCommit, etc.
Our web stack is PHP (version 7 and 8), JavaScript, MySQL, with a little React.
We build our apps using Flutter in Dart, meaning it's easy to deploy to both iOS and Android devices.
But we’ll use whichever tools are best for the job.
The engine behind all our work is Switchplane-built. This engine has grown extensively since its inception back in 2003. It's similar to Symfony and Laravel, but they didn’t exist when we started out, so we built our own.
We use Git (on either GitHub or CodeCommit). We keep our develop branches in an always-releasable state so we can respond to urgent changes if needed.
Our developers work on our code within a dev environment that's kept separate from staging and production. We then release the project to a staging environment for further functional testing. Our clients can test and review at this stage too. Finally, once everyone's happy, we deploy to the production environment.
Our web applications are load-balanced on containerised infrastructure running on AWS ECS. We use AWS RDS for storing application data, which provides a fast and resilient service.
All our development is test driven. We have extensive code review processes to make sure the quality of our code is top-notch.
We take advantage of the tools within the AWS ecosystem to make sure the project is in a healthy state. If a system’s performance is impacted in any way, we are alerted so we can take action.
That’s more than enough tech information for now, but we’re happy to have a more in-depth chat when the need arises.
Take a look at some of our work
Job management systems to HR platforms, apps to help save lives and beyond. Our case studies show the possibilities of custom software across a range of industries.
