The Bristlecone Labs consulting practice is characterized by the following elements:

       • CMMI Level 4 and ISO 9001:2000-certified operations
       • Business continuity and disaster recovery planning to ensure
         uninterrupted service
       • Ongoing quality assessment – We do it right the first time
       • Rich-Apex Manual, 75+ Procedures and 100+ Templates
         and Formats
       • Regular internal audits by a team of 25+ certified internal auditors
       • In-house Central Help Desk (CHD) implementation which also
         tracks customer concerns
       • Established FAST and GEM methodologies

Better Communication and Security
Bristlecone Labs’ communications network provides round-the-clock, high-bandwidth links between our offshore software development centers and onshore centers. These links can also be extended to client locations. This integrated communications and computing infrastructure facilitates interactive computing and distributed software development through:

       • Tightly-managed development and QA environments – routine
          back-ups with no loss in productivity
       • High band-width global connectivity with redundant networks
       • Internet-based communication tools such as Net Meeting and
          instant messaging
       • Secure web-based issue tracking mechanisms, including
         bug-tracking
       • VoIP-based communication systems that support team
          communication via U.S. phone numbers
       • VPN capabilities for access to new builds and global extensibility
         of QA and performance teams

Contingency Planning for Continuity and Recovery
Bristlecone Labs has developed highly-refined contingency plans:

       • Business Continuity Plan – Globally-dispersed locations enable
         Bristlecone to transfer operations to another site if a location
         experiences natural or other disturbances
       • Disaster Recovery Plan – Comprehensive configuration
         management plan ensures that project deliverables at various
         stages of development are stored and uniquely identified. A
         defined methodology for security, access and retrieval enables
         all or part of a system or product to be restored to a known state
         at any time.

Quality Assurance
Bristlecone Labs has a well planned, systematic approach to evaluating quality and adhering to software product standards, processes and procedures. We determine compliance through process monitoring, product evaluation and audits. Our project management and development methodology follows industry best practices and is ISO 9001:2000-complaint. We have compiled best practices from CMMI Level 4 and constantly work towards optimizing our processes.

Our standards include:

       • Documentation standards that specify form and content for
         planning, control and product documentation— drive consistent
         performance throughout a project
       • Design standards that specify the form and content of the design
         product. These standards provide rules and methods for
         translating software requirements into design and representing it
         in design documentation.
      • Code standards that specify the language in which code is to be
        written and define restrictions on the use of language features