Our Approach

Our Approach

End To End: The MountainPass Difference

It is hard enough to find an expert in the technology you need. But building an attractive, intuitive, scalable, secure, stable application, whether on the web or on a mobile device, requires cross-disciplinary awareness and training. We have years of experience in every aspect of application design and development, from early whiteboarding to production deployment. At every step of the process, you will be guided to the best-of-breed solutions not just to the immediate problem, but to the overall, end-to-end product vision.

Define the project scope early.

So much of a project’s success rests on the ability to define the minimum criteria for success, manage ruthlessly to those objectives, and track in a prioritized backlog any new ideas that come up during the process. The first part of any engagement will be to really understand what is critical and what is important but could be deferred, and design for now keeping the future in mind. This allows predictable scheduling, short-term and long-term planning, and transparency into what can otherwise be an opaque and frustrating process.

Create fully clickable wireframes.

The problem: Only by “doing” do certain problems become obvious. Wireframes let you “just do it” before you actually “do it”. This saves massive amounts of time and highlights holes in the design as well as extraneous features that can be deferred early on in the process.

Test-Driven Development ensures quality.

Test-Driven Development is a discipline that forces a declaration of the project’s goals to be written into the code, and allows automated regression testing as new features emerge. Beyond highlighting bugs that can otherwise creep in, it forces you to state your assumptions clearly up front, and brings to light questions that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Allow full transparency for business owners.

You are the one who truly knows the business needs, and if the technology being created will serve those needs. Our business owners get weekly reports on progress, and their feedback is directly incorporated into the next cycle of development. At no time does the team go off for long periods of time with no contact or interaction with the business, so that the team can address concerns quickly and with agility.

Deliverables are valuable at every stage.

If done right, a project presents value throughout its lifetime, not just at the close of the project. At any point, the work that was done to-date has value to the business owner, and the project can be paused or have a change in direction without losing the investment that was made up to that point.

End to End means managing a process that starts by casting a wide net followed by careful scoping, sketching, and prioritization, leading into UX design, graphical treatment, and high-quality test-driven live code. The story ends with a successful product launch to a solid production environment, on-time and on-budget, with close collaboration throughout. We can also take on any individual piece of this continuum and deliver focused value exactly where it is needed.