We provide a different approach to understanding your business, not just a different approach to developing software. We want to gain an understanding of your business, its process, people, and future strategy. From there we’ll seek to refine and streamline your business processes.

Paragon has been developing custom software since 1993. We pride ourselves on a history of delivering 100% of or solutions on-time and on-budget. How do we do it given that developing software is such a difficult and imperfect task?

Before they had a name for it, we adopted what is now called Goal-Driven Development Process (GDP). GDP is a vertically integrated process focused on building software based on business goals rather than requirements. Requirements are typically not identical with business goals because most of the time the requirements are created with knowledge of the business problem but often the larger business goal is not considered.

(From WhitePaper) E. g. for persons with non-technical backgrounds it is hard to understand that a certain behavior of a control on a graphical user interface might become excessively expensive whereas an extensive set of statistical analyzes might come almost for free on top of a relational database. Requirements documents written by these persons tend to include unnecessary expensive wishes while excluding technically simple features that would provide substantial benefit.

The other major aspect of GDP is the focus on the talents of the people. In a vertically integrated model you need people who can traverse the project from understanding the high level business goals to implementing the specific solutions. Most organizations build software more horizontally with people having specific tasks (requirements, system analyst, user-interface designer). This horizontal approach limits each person’s ability to relate to the overall objectives of the project. Implementation and testing are also unique with GDP and receive the greatest amount of time because these two areas directly impact quality. Goal-driven tests are executed at the end of each iteration and compare the actual implementation with the questions formulated during goal definition.

Paragon follows an agile development methodology but incorporates the GDP approach to ensure the “right” solution is delivered on-time and on-budget. We hire a unique individual who is seasoned enough to have conversations with the business problem owners and can also program, test, and deploy the solution.