The NONA Technical Excellence Manifesto

Being a software development studio, we see a lot of projects at various stages come through our doors. Some are embryonic — they’re great ideas, but remain untested. Some are just getting started, but they have clear use cases, or are solving real business problem. And some, well, they’re a bit of a mess.

Let businesses everywhere understand: not all code is created equal.

At NONA, we offer a world-class software development service. We build elegant, maintainable and scalable software that solves real business problems and adds real value. We want to be excellent. And we believe that our partners should want us to be excellent — because we’re building critical components of their businesses. Why should they settle for anything less?

So this is what technical excellence means to us. These are the standards we will uphold come hell or high water, between a rock and a hard place, and while the Spanish Inquisition uses the soft pillows.

Thorough unit, integration and end-to-end testing

Automated testing is one of the cornerstones of modern software development. Good tests don’t only facilitate increased reliability, they also allow changes to be made without worrying about unforeseen effects, increasing development and delivery velocity for the lifetime of the project.

Comprehensive technical documentation

Over the lifetime of a project many developers and stakeholders will likely be onboarded. Good technical documentation facilitates this, ensuring that no important knowledge is lost over time.

Modern clean code

Our coding follows international best practices, prioritising readability and future modifiability.

Fully automated continuous integration and deployment

Iteration should be as smooth and fast as possible. Good CI/CD allows this, making frequent high quality updates possible.

Radical transparency

We give our partners full access to code repositories and our project management suite (Jira). We believe our partners should be able to see how we work, and get real-time updates on development and project progress.

Fully agile, cross-functional teams

We do the scrum, story and sprint thing, across design and development. We’re fully agile, and have been longer than most. We know what works, and how to work smart. And we give our partners updates and demos at a cadence of their choosing — but never in less than 2 week cycles.

Value-adding product and growth expertise

NONA has people who’ve been there and done that. People who built mobile apps for Nokia before mobile was a thing. Now we’re building blockchain identity and payment solutions for pre-eminent tech businesses. In between, we’ve worked with the biggest names in banking, logistics, e-commerce and large-scale media. We’ve also built viral, gamified recruitment tools, and an app that verifies where you live and work (in case you forget, or your bank needs it for something). We bring all of that experience, all those lessons learned, all that blood, sweat and tears to bear on every project we take on.

So our manifesto, our promise to our partners, is excellence in what we do, and we’re happy to open the hood and let you look for yourself whenever you like.

We’re a lot more than a top-notch development studio. We’re a tribe of passionate business-builders, and we love meeting and working with like-minded people. If you want to build something amazing, or step-change your business, get in touch.