Inspired by a Confucius quote "The man of perfect virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others", Nova Software establishes its company mission as "For your success!". We believe that only by putting the interests of clients in the first place can Nova fulfill its own value. We also believe that only by providing the most professional development and high-quality after-sales service can realize Nova's long-term development.

In all projects, Nova adheres to the tenet of "client first", and has accumulated the following advantages:

• the desire to help clients succeed;
• the competence to help clients succeed;
• Proven theory and practice to help customers succeed.

The desire to help clients succeed

Guided by the vision of "For your success ", we believe that only by helping customers succeed, can our value be embodied. So everyone of Nova employee would think about how to create more value for clients.

• When received a requirement from client, we try to explore why this function is needed, so as to choose the smallest cost and the most appropriate solution to implement this requirement. We always take cost and requirement background into consideration instead of just seeing the surface requirement.
• When client put forward an idea, we will compare the same type of products, so that our design is optimized and any waste would be avoided.

For instance, if a school needs a teachers' performance review system, then we will ask these questions: Is this system meant to make the review process fairer? Or its actual goal is to bring more interaction between parents and teachers? Or even it's only wanted by school leader? For different needs of clients, we try to provide more targeted and professional solutions to help customers achieve their goals.

The competence to help clients succeed

To develop a successful IT project means to deliver agreed products in agreed time, with the agreed standards. The reason why Nova can survive in the Internet world for more than 10 years and get the trust of many big customers lies in Nova's long-term accumulation of talent pool, technology and industry experience.

1 .Talent pool

For any company, especially IT industry, the most important assets is its employee. Nova has been insisting on recruiting excellent talents and provide continuously training to its employee.

• All employees of Nova are outstanding students with bachelor's degree or above.
• More than 80% of the staff are developers with an average working life of more than 3 years.
• Nova has set up a complete promotion system to help employees improve their abilities in all fields.
• Four project managers have obtained PMP certificates and two have ACP certificates for international agile project management.
• Nova recruits interns and trains them through a complete training system.

2 .Technical competence

In the long term development, Nov has developed its own software framework -- Coevery framework.

• This mature framework is more stable and has better quality and better performance.
• The common functions can be developed quickly and save cost for clients.

3 .Rich industry experience

Nova's project covers a wide range of fields and industries. It has participated in IT informatization in medical, education, enterprise informatization, auto repair, auto parts, real estate, e-commerce, real estate, catering and other industries, and has accumulated industry solutions for auto repair, auto parts, real estate, e-commerce and other fields.

Theories that help customers succeed and Accumulation of practice

Helping customers succeed is not a slogan, but something we are actually doing. Over the past ten years, Nova has learned advanced management theory with open mind, which makes these management concepts permeate all aspects of work and constantly iterate, making them more applicable to Nova's actual situation.

The following are some thoughts and practices

1. Mature management system

Project Management System

Nova's project management has a complete set of overall management, scope, quality, time, cost, risk, communication, procurement, human resources, stakeholders to ensure smooth and stable development of the project.

Project Management Office (PMO)

In order to improve the overall management level, coordinate resources and better serve customers, Nova has set up a project management office (PMO), to assist and inspect all stages of project start-up, plan, execution, monitoring and closing, and check problems in time.

Set the quality circle, emphasize QA (prevention is better than correction).

Nova attaches great importance to quality, because we firmly believe that even if the product is delivered on time or in advance, it should not be regards as a qualified delivery if there is a quality problem. During the project, the quality circle will evaluate whether the project quality belongs to the green star, yellow star, orange star or red star grade every week. If the quality is poor, the problem must be corrected first, so as to prevent more and more deviations from the original goal.

Example: Software development is similar to pipelining, and it's too late to find and correct problems at the end of the pipelining. Our QA is to check whether the pipeline is normal, and eliminate the problem in its infancy.

2. Agile & Lean Thinking

In addition to the traditional project management knowledge, Nova also absorbs and flexibly uses agile and lean thinking, which are not empty words, but have been fully used in the overall company. For instance:

Continuous improvement & experience accumulation

Nova has accumulated abundant experience in technology, management and various of industries during its 10 more years' operation, and has constantly summarized these experiences into Nova's knowledge base. This knowledge base has become a valuable asset of the company and laid a solid foundation for the smooth progress of new projects.

We firmly believe that a little progress every day and a qualitative leap can be made over time. We will put this idea into weekly reports and meetings and follow up continuously.

Example:

1. Ask employees to summarize their personal weekly work, find out their own improvements, and urge them to improve.

2. In each week/stage, constantly summarize the good things and bad things, then continue the good ones, and enhance the bad ones.

Acceptance by iteration, decrease WIP (work in progress)

If each task is only partially completed and the rest is started without acceptance, then these functions belong to WIP. When WIP piles up and there will be serious problems at the end. In the process of development, Nova will divide functions into iterations (small submissions). Every submission, there will be an increase in completed workable functions. In this way, the product will be approaching to completion, rather than show the customer what has been done at the last moment.

5 Whys

When problems occur, if the root cause is not found, the superficial problems will happen again and again. The method of "5 whys" is to ask more questions and find the root causes to solve them.

Examples:

• 1. When find kitchen smells, spray air freshener can solve this problem, but what is the root cause?
• 2. It turned out that there was sewage in a bucket, the sewage can be poured out, but why there is sewage?
• 3. there is a faucet above the bucket, plug up the faucet, then there will be no sewage. But why do the faucets leak?
• ...

Find the root cause step by step

Internet thinking, MVP (minimum viable product), prototype

The Internet world is changing with each passing day. If you want to do a big thing first, it may not be suitable for the market already when it is finished. Nova therefore encourages customers to consider using MVP (minimal viable products) to test the market and, if the market responds well, then you can continuously improve the product. The prototype is a kind of MVP: first, it does not specifically implement the function, but first draws the sketches with the tool, which can quickly visualize the idea in your mind, and is very easy to adjust.

Story:

• Customer: I want to make an internal management system, which is to manage performance distribution. I have no idea what to do. Can you offer a quote?
• Nova: (Not quite sure what the customer really wants) Shall we first make a prototype to show your ideas in detail?
• Customer: (After the prototype is ready) Well, if you change these two places, it should be the system I want!
• Nova: OK, then we will implement those functions based on the prototype.

Below are 2 pictures of prototype： 

3. Advanced tools and practices

Good theory cannot be separated from good tools. Nova chose the mainstream project management and code management to make the project and work management efficient and to live up to the trust of customers.

JIRA task management tool

Using JIRA's Kanban tool, we can clearly see the work arrangements of each member, the overall situation of the project, so that to reduce errors.

Git code management tool

Git is a mature tool for managing multi-person development. Nova Software has successfully switched all projects to git management

Scene:

• Q: when new members join the project, many people do not understand, and bring problems to others.
• A: Using Git's auditing function, only the audited code can be submitted with code base to reduce risk.
• Q: I always want to see the latest functions, but there are always codes in development, what if the version cannot be released?
• A: Nova has a set of GIT management process to ensure that the main branch is a validated and functioning version.

Listing tools

Software development is like driving a airplane. There may be various abnormal situations, such as environment, third party issues and so on, when releasing a version. What precautions can be taken for each problem? How can we ensure that every step is implemented? Checking the list item by item will solve the problem. In the development of more than ten years, Nova has accumulated a large number of lists to be reused.

Story:
In May 2018, a Chongqing-to-Lhasa Sichuan Airlines plane had an accident on the way. With the professional skills and spirit of captain Liu Chuanjian, the plane landed safely, this was an exciting news. Why did captain Liu Chuanjian know how to deal with problems? It's because he flips out the flight manual every day and reviews it. He remembers the flight manual (list) well and can deal with problems calmly.

Summary

With its mature project management system, Nova strives to achieve both project goals and business goals, thus realizing true value for clients. Nova also benefit from this process as we learn more every time we solve a problem for a client.