Declara

Overview

Declara

Declara, based out of Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia, is an intel­li­gent social net­work­ing plat­form designed to observe how peo­ple learn and adjust accordingly.
Declara is the brain­child of ser­i­al entre­pre­neur Ramona Pier­son and has, to date, raised over $21M in ven­ture backed cap­i­tal through two sep­a­rate rounds. With heavy­weight investor names such as Peter Thiel back­ing the company.

Services Provided

User Experience

UI Design

App Development

Platform

iOS

Challenge

The Challenge

Declara approached ISBX in the fall of 2012 with the goal of build­ing a suite of intel­li­gent mobile prod­ucts cen­tered around the social inter­ac­tions of peo­ple like jour­nal­ists and edu­ca­tors. These appli­ca­tions, more than just social net­works, were designed to col­lect an array of con­tent — any­thing from sim­ple text, to con­ver­sa­tions, top­ics and images, with­in an acces­si­ble plat­form that would enable the users use of such fea­tures like the cam­era, loca­tion based ser­vices, and a gen­er­al medi­um to inter­act with oth­er users regard­less of where they were. These apps were tar­get­ed towards a broad range of top­ics such as social issues and pro­gres­sive learn­ing, with the ulti­mate goal of val­i­dat­ing one’s own per­son­al learn­ing experience.
At the ear­li­est stages of the engage­ment, the client was absent of its own devel­op­ment team, and exclu­sive­ly relied on ISBX for the daunt­ing task of assess­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of high­ly pro­pri­etary con­cepts and dis­till­ing these into an exe­cutable prod­uct — in one spe­cif­ic case, build­ing the first pieces of the plat­form for the largest, nation­al, non-prof­it and gov­ern­ment run edu­ca­tion sys­tem, with­in a high­ly com­pressed time frame.
Solution

Solution

The nature of the project, a fast-evolv­ing and con­stant­ly improv­ing soft­ware sys­tem, required an equal­ly well adapt­ed project man­age­ment and soft­ware devel­op­ment method­ol­o­gy to sup­port it. ISBX deter­mined that using an Agile/SCRUM process would allow both teams to iter­ate and enhance the plat­form on an almost real-time basis while allow­ing for valu­able prod­uct feed­back by its stake­hold­ers. Through the use of its Cer­ti­fied Scrum Mas­ters (CSM), ISBX’s robust pro­gram man­age­ment process addressed things like:
  • Build­ing the core soft­ware product
  • Enhanc­ing the core soft­ware prod­uct with new sys­tems and features
  • Devel­op­er oper­a­tions such as scal­able infra­struc­ture enhance­ments and configurability
  • Soft­ware Releas­es and Release Planning
  • Regres­sion and Qual­i­ty Assur­ance Testing
  • Engag­ing with the Client on the over­all vision
ISBX was also grant­ed par­tial own­er­ship and respon­si­bil­i­ty of the prod­uct itself, allow­ing us to make crit­i­cal deci­sions in the prod­uct plan­ning phas­es to assure suc­cess­ful deliv­ery of the prod­uct in aggres­sive time­frames. ISBX cred­its the syn­er­gis­tic rela­tion­ship with Pier­son Labs in enabling it acces­si­bil­i­ty to light­ning fast deci­sions and the even­tu­al shap­ing of the Declara prod­uct as it stands today.

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