Custom Application Development

Headspring specializes in developing custom applications to meet your business needs. Let us turn your idea into working software.

Rank 127 on the Inc. 500

Inc. magazine has ranked Headspring NO. 127 on its 28th annual Inc. 500, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America's independent-minded entrepreneurs. Learn More.

Four Microsoft MVPs

Headspring's Jeffrey Palermo, Eric Hexter, Matt Hinze, and Jimmy Bogard each hold Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represent the technical community's best and brightest. There are fewer than 4,000 active Microsoft MVPs. Learn More.

We're Published Authors

ASP.NET MVC in Action: With MVC Contrib, NHibernate, and more was written by Headspring's Jeffrey Palermo and Jimmy Bogard, with coauthor Ben Scheirman. This clearly-written introduction to the ASP.NET MVC framework and the MVC approach to web development is garnering good reviews. Learn More.

Microsoft Gold Partner

Headspring Systems has earned the level of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, meeting requirements by holding a full-time staff exclusively of Microsoft Certified Professionals and providing to Microsoft client references demonstrating that Headspring Systems can meet the needs of clientele using Microsoft technologies. Learn More.

Our moms taught us to share.

Because so much of our efficiency comes from open-source sharing and re-use of successful code modules, we believe in the power of open source. So much so that we frequently share our own code with other developers; yes, even our competitors.

We know .NET inside and out.

Microsoft's ASP.NET is a framework for application development which serves as a foundation upon which Agile teams may build web sites, web applications, web services, smart client applications, and even Silverlight animations. .NET custom software may be built in a handful of languages, but the industry has standardized around C# (as has Headspring). Headspring has chosen to make .NET Agile development in C# one of its core competencies as the majority of its key players come to Headspring with extensive ASP.NET backgrounds including working knowledge of and substantial contributions to many open source additions which allow for improvements upon or more efficiency with the standard capabilities of .NET.

What lies Beneath the Hood?

It is the 21st century and thus it is almost a certainty that a custom application has been built for your enterprise. Do you ever wonder how the code is crafted behind the user interface you see day-to-day? Do you especially wonder this when the second party you hired to refine the application seems to be struggling to change it?

It is good to wonder what lies beneath the hood. Custom application development may be approached in numerous ways. There are industry standards for many good practices, but there are also some grey areas. The need for maintainable software is paramount however, and should be the prime consideration when weighing options for an approach. It is best not to build a mess in the name of fast turnaround and low cost which may not meet product owner expectations or be agreeable to change. Look out for two pitfalls:

Beware of the big ball of mud.

Headspring Systems employees object-oriented design and the Single Responsibility Principle ensuring that logic is divided into independent pieces so modular and diminutive that any one piece has but one reason to ever change. This keeps the code base easy to reverse-engineer and modify. In the absence of this discipline a big ball of mud forms in the code as "God classes" progressively become harder and harder to either refine or "work around" (i.e. hack.) Headspring furthermore loosely couples core business logic to that which interacts with it (the user interface, the database, web services, etc.) and guarantees that each modular, diminutive nugget functions as expected by way of unit and integration tests. These safeguards ensure that an application may be appended without breaking what already works.

Beware of waterfall.

This is an approach to custom application development in which requirements are gathered upfront and then never refined along their journey to "completion." Headspring Systems undertakes Agile development to ensure that work is broken into sprints and at the end of every sprint iterative stakeholder feedback is digested in the name of course corrections, be they minor or major. At the end of an Agile undertaking, an application will meet expectations. At the end of the waterfall process, developers can only hope they landed somewhere within the ballpark of what was desired so that the requests for rework are possible and require only mild backpedalling. Also a velocity (the speed of incremental progress) is evident early in the Agile process while turnaround time for crafting functionality is otherwise notoriously hard to estimate.