1.     Pricing

What is the basic hourly rate?

Pricing depends on whether we adhere to Time & Materials (T&M) or Fixed Price (FP) approach. The hourly rate in latter case is usually higher because of additional risks involved. The complexity of the software may also affect the price because we will have to use resources that are more expensive. The general idea is that our rates are 2-3 times lower than those charged by Western-European software development companies for the same services.

What about traveling and accommodation expenses? 

During software development project, there are cases when a personal visit to Sponsor’s site is necessary. Usually the related expenses are covered by Sponsor (Order giving Firm). These expenses include:

Transportation:
Airplane tickets (economic class)
Airport transfer
Hotel – office travel (if necessary)

Accommodation:
Hotel or other housing

General:
Living (equivalent of $40 per day)

Are there other applicable charges and fees? 

Sponsor should be responsible for obtaining Visas and other necessary permits. No other fees and charges are applicable.

2.     Quality Standards

Describe the Quality System in place: 

Mirasoft has adopted an internal processes system based on Rational Unified Process (RUP) – 2000 and ISO 9001. However, to the date the formal ISO 9001 certification procedure was not completed. The main obstacle is a steep pricing of appropriate consultancies. More details are given below.

What information is presented in Mirasoft Quality Manual Book?

 Mirasoft Quality Manual includes an information on the following topics:

• Project phases:

  • Inception

  • Elaboration

  • Construction

  • Transition 

• Organogramm

  • Role description

  • Workflows

• Business modeling

• Requirements

• Analysis & Design Implementation

• Build Process

• Test

• Deployment

• Environment

• Project management

  • Configuration & Change Management

  • Reporting 

• Artifacts & Templates

  • Management set

  • Requirements set

  • Design set

  • Implementation set

  • Test set

  • Deployment set

  • Change management set

• Guidelines

 The number of documents related to Quality Assurance exceeds 900. The total size of these files is about 150 MB. Therefore, these materials are available for an on-site audit only. We may send you some documents you deem critical via e-mail (See Change Request management guidelines as an example).

3.     Project Management Practices

Describe communication between Mirasoft and Sponsor: 

Both parties must have Contract Coordinators and Technical Coordinators assigned. The complete contact information is included into every Project Agreement.

The primary means of communication is e-mail. Mirasoft also arranges regular telephone conferences with its clients. Video conferencing will be available in 2001 after we upgrade our Internet connection to 1Mbps.

Management visits are also an important part of Mirasoft-customer communication.

Describe your Change Management practices:

 Change Management process involves gathering and taking appropriate action based on Change Requests from project stakeholders. Details are described in the Change Request (CR) management guidelines. Change control board decides and monitors the process. CR in its life cycle goes through the defined chain of 6-8 states (from “submitted” to  “closed” or “rejected”). 

What kinds of standard reporting are used?

• Regular reporting:

• Competence group (CG) status report (monthly)

• Project status report (weekly)

• Competence Group Leaders (CGL) meeting minutes (weekly)

• CG meeting minutes (weekly)

•  Standard templates of the above reports are available.

4.     Contract Details

For how long is a Master Agreement (MA) in effect?

 See Master Development Agreement Template (Section 14). 

The Master Development Agreement may be effective for a period of 2-3 years of remain in force until terminated. Under the general terms of MA a series of Project Agreements (Statements of Work) is signed. The duration period of these subordinate agreements is limited to a particular project period.

In what cases and how can MA be terminated?

See Master Development Agreement Template (Section 14).

 MA may have a clause that a Sponsor has a right to terminate a Project Agreement upon 30 days written notice. This period for MA, itself may be extended to 60 days. Once Developer (Mirasoft) has entered a project, he may not terminate corresponding Project Agreement.

We may devise different terms for our MA.

Describe Time & Materials approach vs. Fixed Price approach:

 See Master Development Agreement Template (Section 5).

Are there any Non-Competition provisions in MA?

Our customers did not demand special Non-Competition provisions. Thus, there is no Non-Competition clause in the MA template. However, we are ready to include such provisions into MA if it is important for Sponsor and does not affect on the relationships with existing customers.

How Intellectual Property Rights are treated?

 See Master Development Agreement Template (Section 10).

The Ownership and Rights section of the proposed template is based upon Swiss laws. IPR laws of Iceland may have their own peculiarities. Therefore, this section may be elaborated to meet them.

 The Customer’s IPR are strictly protected by Employment Contract and Non-Disclosure Statement signed by every employee of Mirasoft. Now these document are in Russian only. We could make a certified translation for you if necessary.

What usually represent Deliverables in accordance with MA? 

See Master Development Agreement Template (Section 9). 

In practice, usually a project Deliverables in electronic form are made available on Mirasoft private FTP site in password-protected archives.

5.     Case Studies & References

What are most remarkable projects done?

Who can be called concerning the above projects?

Company: New Miracle AG

Contact person: Mr. Franco Dal Molin / CTO

Phone number: +41 62 916 55 55

Company: Dakota Imaging, Inc.

Contact person: Mr. Pradeep Goel / COO

Phone number: + 1 410 381 31 13

Company: PRIWAG

Contact person: Mr. Urs Wuetrich / Geshaeftsleiter

Phone number: + 41 61 465 96 00

6.     Development Environment

What software development tools are routinely used at Mirasoft?

MS Visual Studio, Borland JBuilder, Oracle JDeveloper, Rational Rose, Visual Modeler, Visual SourceSafe

What security practices are adopted?

The administration of LAN is centralized. Requests for modification of permissions are reviewed and approved by senior management. Usually participants of a particular project belong to a special group of users and permissions are assigned on a group-by-group basis.

Mirasoft has a dedicated security officer who is responsible for security-related issues. Every employee sign Non-Disclosure statements. Separate confidentiality provisions are a part of an Employment Contract.

No security-related incidents were detected in Mirasoft history.

What skills and expertise do Mirasoft employees possess?

Mirasoft expertise includes BPI, EAI, ERP (xrp), XML-based object exchange.

Programming languages, databases and technologies we are familiar with: C/C++ (MFC, STL), Java (EJB), Perl, MS SQL Server (OLEDB, DBLIB, ODBC), Oracle (OCI), COM/DCOM, BizTalk, Corba.

Mirasoft has 17 certified UML developers and 7 qualified project leaders. 20 developers recently received training in RUP.

What types of service can Mirasoft provide?

The main and the only business of Mirasoft is software development outsourcing services. Other IT services requests, like document conversion or data entry, can be considered by Mirasoft or other companies of Miratech Software Group.

7.     Team Growth

How fast can we increase/decrease size of team?

Generally it depends on the specialists we need to find and hire. Usually we need up to 3-4 weeks to organize a small team (up to 5 person). The size of the team could be doubled within 4 months The database of our Human Resources department contains more than 500 records of potential candidates.

We seek to establish long-term relationships with our clients. Nevertheless, there are circumstances when we have to decrease the size of the team. T&M arrangement may carry some limitation on dismissing people too fast. The decreasing of the team must be planned beforehand. In Fixed Price model, you will not have any HR obligations after a project ends.

8.     Outsourcing model

Describe development teams, development environment, etc:

See Master Development Agreement Template.

Software development at Mirasoft is organized around competence groups. Currently we have 3 such groups. In general, a competence group consists of a group leader (CGL), 3-4 developers (DE), a validation and verification engineer (VVE) and a technical writer (AU). Generally, each competence group is assigned to a particular project. Still horizontal connections between competence groups exist. In case of our cooperation, we may need to create a new competence group.

Mirasoft and other companies of Miratech Software Group are located at the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev. You are welcome to visit our office to meet our people and look at where we work.