FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q. Do you have the ability to customize your environments to match the client? Please explain.
A. Yes. We work with several clients as an extended development team. This requires us to use the development, testing, and build tools as used by the client. This is usually a one time effort and takes only a couple of day's time to sync up our environment with clients.

Q. Please provide some details about the service you offer? Do you offer “Full” service which includes a project manager, architect, developers, and testers? If so, do you have the flexibility to offer these skills? On the contrary, do you have the flexibility to allow me to use only the skills I need if necessary?
A. We provide services in the area of application development, application maintenance, database and application migration, testing- functional and  automated, portal development, and business intelligence.We are a team of 95+ full time employees and also engage contractors on a need basis. We have full time architects, designers, developers, projects managers, UI engineers, testing engineers, and business analysts who work on our projects. We can provide turnkey services as well as give our clients an option of using only the skills needed by them in a project. Many of our clients had initially started working with 1 or 2 developers and then moved onto utilizing our testing services
and turnkey project delivery capabilities respectively.

Q. Do you have the ability to conduct conference calls or online meetings if needed? How much advanced notice is necessary?
A. Yes. We have the necessary infrastructure in place to conduct conference calls and online meetings. From an infrastructure perspective, no advance notice is needed to have these meetings. For scheduling purposes, usually 2 days is good to make sure that people have enough time to plan their calendars and can confirm in advance.

Q. What are some of the services you use, web or otherwise, to conduct conference calls or online meetings?
A. We use VOIP phone for our meetings. If requested by clients, our developers can share their Skype id. For online meetings and desktop sharing we use GoToMeeting. 

Q. What are your standard operating hours relative to U.S.- Eastern Standard Time (New York)? Do you operate on U.S. time as well as your local time?
A. Our US office in Irvine works from 9 AM PST (12 Noon EST) to 6 PM PST (9 PM EST). In our India office, people usually work from 9 AM IST to 7 PM IST (which is 5.30 PM EST to 9.30 AM EST). However, depending on the project needs and client's time zone, we adjust timings of the project team to provide necessary overlap to our clients. Our project coordinators can usually provide an overlap till 2PM EST.

Q. What project management tools do you use?
A. Dot project and OpenProject for project management and Actitime for time management.

Q. What kind of lead time do you require for each project? Please provide a minimum lead time and a lead time that you would be most comfortable with.
A. On an average 2 days lead time is good for small projects (less than 2 person month), 4  days is good for mid sized projects (2 ~ 6 person month) and 8 days for larger projects (6+ person month). Many a times our clients keep us posted on likely projects to come and thus we create our plan based on this information.

Q. For application development do you work on a time and materials basis, fixed bid basis, or both? Are there any other ways in which you work?
A. We work on T&M as well as Fixed Price basis. Many a times, the project starts with T&M and once the scope is frozen it gets converted to a fixed price project. For websites, portals and e-commerce solutions, we have prices depending on the components required by a client.

Q. What development methodology does your company typically use? Are you flexible?
A. One is Waterfall for projects with a clear scope definition and the other is Agile for startups, projects which evolve by the day.

Q. What type of warranties do you provide with your services and for the quality of your work?
A. 30 days free bug fixing support from the date of handing over the solution for beta testing.

Q. What types of agreements do you work under with your clients? (I.e. confidentiality, non-compete, privacy, etc.) Are any of your clients US based?
A. More than 70 % of our customers are US based (around 100 customers). To maintain confidentiality we sign a Non Disclosure Agreement with our customers. For each customer we have a Master Professional Services agreement which covers things like Ownership, Non Compete, Employee and Client Solicitation, etc. We also sign a SOW which contains
project scope, team working on it, delivery schedules, prices, and any specific terms of business for a project not covered in the MPSA.

Testimonial :

Sigma is a very professionally run organization that makes the processes of offshore development as easy and efficient as it can be. They have very high quality talent that are able to deliver quality meeting our tough standards. The relationship with sigma has enabled us to cost effectively expand our resource pool and bring our product to market
faster and with a more complete user experience.

- Erik Hogan, Director-Product Management, Attributor Corporation, Redwood City, USA

I want to thank you and your staff for delivering our project under such stressful conditions. Sigma Infosolutions undertook to learn our complex requirements, document them, engineer and code according to our requests. The company delivered remarkable results given the aggressive time constraints we faced. They understood how to interpret our vague requirements and generate outstanding results. We are grateful to have found Sigma to work with as a trusted advisor. I will not hesitate to leverage their outstanding design and coding skills as we move forward with our visualisation and Java requirements.
-  Mike Mc.Gonigal,  Exsalgo Corp., USA

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