The Mission

Amplified Development helps your software organization improve its effectiveness through application of the best software processes and architecture. Our current areas of focus are:

  • Behavior Driven Design (BDD) - Effective collaboration between developers and stakeholders leads to clear requirements, clean architecture, and high quality systems.
  • Serverless Architecture - Letting cloud service providers care for provisioning and scaling infrastructure enables an efficient deployment process that lets you focus on delivering value at significant cost savings.

Principal Consultant

 

Kevin Sleeper: With decades of experience running software teams, Kevin gets the best out of skilled developers. As a serious student of modern software processes, he establishes team processes founded on genuinely agile principles, not just a veneer of agile-sounding buzz-words. Kevin’s current passion is Behavior Driven Design (BDD), which combines clear requirements, modern software process, and disciplined API and UI architecture. You can be assured of a solid application back-end since Kevin thinks instinctively in data models and deeply understands the practical application of RESTful API principles.

“Kevin in second to none in the areas of software architecture, quality methods and building effective software development teams and processes.”
— David Freedman, Consulting Executive, LegalZoom
“Kevin combines the insight and field-of-view of the best long-term strategic thinkers, discrete planning skills that yield constant forward momentum, and a truly impressive ability to consider all benefits vs. tradeoffs prior to making decisions.”
— Luke Stewart, Enterprise Architect, Blackline
“What really stands out … is [Kevin’s] ability to reduce complex problems to their essential elements and then devise a systematic and methodical solution….  He is a great manager – focused, disciplined and results-oriented.”
— Michael Ebstein, Founder, m.e. squared, inc.
“Kevin is brilliant. He’s an expert coder, master problem solver, and astute manager. Kevin’s team shipped more quality, user-friendly software to more customers than any software group I’ve worked for since.”
— Anil Kripalani, Client Executive, Avanade

Behavior Driven Design (BDD):

BDD starts with requirements expressed in a structured language understandable to product stakeholders. We make generous use of examples to remove ambiguity between the product stakeholders, developers, and QA staff. Each requirement is expressed as an automated test, providing clarity for developers. As a by-product, confidence remains high that the requirements continue to accurately reflect the implemented system behavior throughout the project. In order to succeed, there are practical issues to overcome:

  • How do you balance requirements clarity with efficient implementation?
  • How do you prevent complex test data setup from making test implementations too costly and too brittle?
  • Should BDD implementations be full integration tests or have their external dependencies simulated?

At AmpDev, we have practical answers to the BDD challenges you are facing.

Serverless Architecture:

Letting your cloud provider provision resources on-demand enables your applications to scale effortlessly and without limits. Serverless is an ideal model for growing minimal viable products (MVPs) into operational systems. But, the architecture comes with unique challenges. For example:

  • Can you overcome function time limits to run processes lasting hours or even days?
  • How do you keep the unlimited scalability of serverless processes from overwhelming limited dependencies (e.g. databases)?

AmpDev has developed strategies for overcoming these and other unique challenges of serverless.