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Below is our recent interview with Graham Church, CEO at CodeFirst:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to CodeFirst?
A: CodeFirst is a UK based software development company. We work with companies such as Dell, IBM, and Medtronic providing them with customized software solutions. We bolster our clients in-house IT capabilities by assisting them with our development expertise.
Q: Graham, let’s start with your background. What were you doing before CodeFirst?
A: I started off around 25 years ago as a software developer before progressing my career into management and then finally consulting. I delivered software solutions for many high profile companies such as Pfizer, Sony Ericsson, Prudential, ABB, Lycos. My role as a consultant was to help companies deliver their projects and build out their development capability. I realized I could help my clients more by expanding the services I could offer as an individual consultant. So with some long standing colleagues I formed CodeFirst and over time increased our capabilities and the solutions we offered.
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Q: What kinds of services do your provide to your clients?
A: We provide a variety of outsourced software development services to our clients. Mostly we are focused on enterprise systems for businesses. We either build them for scratch or take over ongoing projects where we maintain and modernize existing systems. We also provide our clients with any development resources they may need for their projects. This could be anything from a single developer to a complete project team.
Q: Your agile planning tool PlanITpoker has recently surpassed the one million user mark; could you tell us something more?
A: We have been really surprised with the uptake of PlanITpoker. It was originally just a simple tool built for our development teams to estimate our projects. We thought it would be nice to share it with the Agile development community so we released it publicly. Over the years we refined it and added new features. It seems a lot of developers around the world find it useful which is great!
Q: What makes CodeFirst stand out from its competition?
A: CodeFirst is focused on successful outcomes. We are a for-profit company for sure, but we are quite selective with the projects we take on. For example we don’t work with many start-ups. The reason for this is that we don’t believe a software startup should outsource its product development. It can sometimes work for development of a minimal viable product or prototype to raise funding, but really if a software startup is going to have the best chance for success it must have technical expertise in the founding team. We prefer to form long-term partnerships with mid – large sized organizations. Often we will suggest a small deliverable when we first work with a new client. This enables to start building trust and establishing a solid working relationship. Most of our growth comes from our existing clients expanding the work that they outsource to us.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: CodeFirst will continue to grow and firmly establish itself as the UK’s number one custom software development house.
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