Laravel development for Böblingen and Sindelfingen

Böblingen and Sindelfingen lie south-west of Stuttgart and are shaped by two things. One is vehicle manufacturing, which is hard to miss here. The other is less obvious and matters more to us: an unusually dense IT landscape.

The Böblingen/Sindelfingen software centre is among the larger sector-specific technology centres in Europe and houses around a hundred firms. Add to that microelectronics, driver assistance systems and a business quarter on the old airfield where technology companies have been settling for years.

Here there is nearly always somebody technical across the table

That changes projects from the outset. Anyone getting in touch from here generally has an IT department of their own, sometimes a development team as well. So the question is never “who can do this” but “who does which part”.

In cases like these we work as the external part of an existing team and fit into its ways of working rather than putting our own alongside.

The effort then rarely sits in the programming. It sits in the question of where the boundary runs. Who operates, who develops, who decides on architecture, and what happens when both sides want to change something in the same module. We settle those points before the quotation, because that is what the effort is measured by, not the number of screens.

The handover effort in the other direction is regularly underestimated. When your team takes over later, it needs more than source code: the reasoning behind decisions you cannot see in the result, and a date on which somebody can ask questions.

Integration as the focus

In organisations that have grown, hardly anything stands on its own. There is an identity management system to dock onto, a permissions scheme that applies, and three systems writing the same personnel number differently.

The effort sits in the transitions, and so do the faults that only show up in production. What happens when a neighbouring system is being maintained? Is a half-transferred record rolled back or does it stay put? Does anybody notice that nothing has arrived since Tuesday? We answer those questions while building and not during an incident. More on that under API and backend development.

Carrying old applications forward

A large share of enquiries concerns applications that have existed for a long time. They run, they are needed, and nobody dares touch them any more because the person who wrote them has left the building.

Before we say anything about that, we look at the code. Usually the situation is better than its reputation. What comes out is a list with a few urgent and many unimportant points, along with a view on whether carrying it forward is worth it or whether a rebuild would be more honest. What gets checked is under consulting and code audit.