Young Innovations Pvt. Ltd.

YoungInnovations Private Limited(YIPL) began official operation around 2 years ago, from then we have served multiple clients to meet their business needs. We have worked with INGOs like UNICEF, company like HomeFacts in the United States to local companies.

In the course of 2 years, we have focused on continuous improvement on our work process to deliver the best service we could. We work mostly on open source products and believe in promoting open source. So, below are the 5 reasons or the things we do differently that gives us an edge over other software houses:

1. Project Management Software

We at YIPL use Redmine open source project management software, after trying some project management and issue tracking tools we settled on Redmine. We have a culture to track and document all the issues and now even involve clients in the whole process of tracking and solving any issues or bugs in the system we develop.

Daily we set a small amount of time to go through our issues, we assign issues to ourselves, to other team members and also have a way to review what we accomplished in the day. The time tracking part helps us know what we worked on and its documented for future reference as well.

2. Source Code Version Control

Previously we had used Sub Version(SVN) for some projects but now we have shifted to GIT. GIT is free and open source, fast and distributed version control management system. Not only it facilitates working in a team but also help us track who worked on what part of a project.

At present all our projects have version control setup in Git and as GIT is a distributed version control system, the same project has multiple code copies. This is like a backup of the project as well as we can move to any previous state back in time to see how the project was then.

3. MVC Framework

For all web applications we have developed we used CodeIgniter Model View Controller (MVC) web application framework. We have recently tested Zend Framework for a project and we are planning to shift to the Zend Framework to meet our growing needs.

MVC arguably may be the silver bullet for web applications, but put in simple words it is one of the best way to separate the business login, application logic from the presentation layer.

Use of a MVC web application framework speeds up the development process, rather than the code we can focus on productivity and creativity.

4. Content Management System (CMS)

We use Drupal open source web Content Management System (CMS) for all our websites. We are Drupal promoters, users and addicts in our own right. Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Drupal is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

All our websites run on Drupal, it has helped us to be productive in least amount of time. We can jot up a prototype in a day and show a client something within hours.

5. Linux

Almost all the systems at YIPL run on Linux. Except of one Mac book pro and one different distro all other systems at YIPL are on Ubuntu. We are proud users of Linux as it helps the us leverage benefits from tools like GIT and other great linux benefits, and also have a production like environment in the local machine. Rather then we explaining you on why to use linux have a look here , and yes because we are all linux we are virus free.

If  you are a PHP development shop and not using linux then it may be time to rethink and you should know what things you are missing.

My Experience

In my experience, small and medium sized web and software companies do not follow any framework or version control. They start each project from scratch and don't have a standard or fixed framework to work with. YIPL has a definite edge over these types of companies, as we follow framework and version control. A project management tool also helps us improve our productivity, it helps our internal communication a great deal.

Conclusion

We try to adhere the tested standard and norms of software engineering, with firm belief in Agile Development , we seek to deliver the best service using the best tools at our dispense. We plan to incorporate test driven development (TDD) in future that will help us to write quality code.

We also use Jquery as the javascript library for all our development work and mainly use the 960 Grid  CSS framework for our CSS needs. I guess the designers at YIPL will blog about it in detail in near future.

Even if you are considering to join YIPL as a programmer or developer then you must be comfortable with either a MVC framework or at least one content management system preferably Drupal.