Ancient origins
You may encounter the conjugated Latin noun solertium in many old texts. The genitive plural of solers, it means the collective ingenuity or skill of a group. So this company is literally named after its most important asset!
Solertium opened in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2006, and has grown carefully and steadily. Our immediate proximity to the College of William & Mary is a strategic asset, as many of our team members have active ties to the College. Our offices and training lab are located in the Design Center at New Town, in Suite 202. Visitors are welcome!
To learn more about specific development services we can perform, please visit our services page. Here, we simply introduce ourselves by way of our philosophy and attitudes.
Honesty, Integrity, and Respect
These are the core principles our team lives by, the foundation of all our work. We can only build well when we build upon these principles. We cultivate many other properties like industriousness, commitment, and clever lateral thinking, but without mutual honesty, integrity, and respect between all project participants, no effort can truly succeed.
Enterprising Software
In certain contexts, words can take on an inverted meaning. Someone who is "enterprising" is innovative, goal-oriented, a get-it-done individual you want to employ. But "enterprise" software is typically bloated, slow, expensive, and archaic. Goal-displacing, heavyweight enterprise development practices waste money as they lumber towards creating systems that no one wants to use.
In challenging economic times, every size of business needs software that works, that lasts, and that quickly returns its original investment. Quality and robustness are not negotiable; neither can they be traded for efficiency and innovation. The Solertium approach produces affordable, robust software systems that are ready to go to market and work for a living: enterprising software.
Stepping Outside The Box
Our team approach offers a great opportunity to combine our skills and knowledge in new and unique ways. We like hard problems. We love the chance to invent, pioneer and break new ground, to produce something that no one has ever seen before. If your software needs are already met by existing off-the-shelf solutions, it's near certain you don't need us to do a project for you. On the other hand, if you see an acute need for something that apparently doesn't exist, and maybe have heard is outright impossible ... we should talk.
One Step At A Time
We are fanatical about incremental, agile development. We believe that it's easier to win the lottery than to scope and build a successful product in one mammoth surge. Instead, we structure engagements with numerous, rapidly arriving deliverables. Each of these milestones presents a valuable opportunity for feedback, refactoring, and redesign.
In incremental development, each stage of investment is conditioned on proven successes. When an element of the project is not working, or a milestone deliverable uncovers new issues, the incremental approach encourages everyone to face problems early and effectively, before costs and errors spiral to threaten the overall project.
Small, Effective Teams
Effectiveness goes up dramatically as a second and third engineer join a task, then levels off and even falls as the task group continues to grow. We divide big jobs into functional blocks that a small, effective team can accomplish. The work is coordinated at a high level by a technical lead, usually the most knowledgeable and deeply immersed software engineer on the project.
Low Management Overhead
Five to ten percent of a given Solertium project's time is typically invested in customer communication. We strive to ensure that this is productive, high-fidelity interaction with the engineers involved in the work. No project budget is wasted on unnecessary layers of management.
Open Source Standards
Some of our work is open source, and some is closed source. People who always work in closed source environments can easily get sloppy. Since no one outside the organization will ever see or check their work, there is limited incentive to create code that would stand up to peer scrutiny.
We prefer to approach every project, even proprietary, closed source work, as if it could face public examination at any moment. We ask questions: what would our peers think of our work? If they were to run a static analysis tool like lint or FindBugs, will they spot mistakes? Are we certain that the product is all our original work and clear of licensing restrictions? Is intellectual property ownership clearly marked?
We also learn continually from our active experiences in the open source community. With effectively zero overhead, most large open source projects effectively coordinate the efforts of hundreds of contributors around the world, in contact only by occasional email and forum posts. This phenomenon stands in stark contrast to enterprise methodologies where management overhead and meeting time substantially outweigh engineering cost.
Testing and Analysis
Some programming languages and development platforms are easier to test and analyze than others. We like to work with technologies that boast lots of robust and reliable strategies for testing and analysis. In programmer-speak, that translates to a fondness for strong typesystems, static analysis, debugging, unit testing, and load testing.
Measurable Success
Before we undertake any project, we strive to understand the business case. Why is money being spent on us as a professional development team? What outcome or return is expected on the development? This understanding provides a compass to guide our efforts and our consultative advice. It also allows us to design in performance measurements (e.g. web analytics, logging, reports and summaries) that can be used to compare actual outcomes to expectations.
More than 90% of Solertium's business comes from existing customers and direct referrals. By actively and cooperatively measuring success and learning from each project, we grow with our customers and foster greater successes in the future.
contactUs
Solertium Corporation
4350 New Town Avenue
Suite 202
Williamsburg, VA 23188
USA
Phone: +1-757-345-5445
Fax: +1-757-345-0315
Email: info@solertium.com
Skype: solertium