Coactive
Rapid Agile Delivery

Since the arrival of digital machinery, businesses have found themselves stuck between hard-pressed IT departments and a lack of skilled in-house resources for custom-built applications. In the face of this struggle, business units resort instead, to shadow IT. In the risk-averse IT spectrum, this comes laden with numerous security threats because of the use of outdated software by unskilled IT teams. The fundamental problem here is that businesses can’t seem to get what they need from their technical teams quick enough. The business is developing, or at least desires to develop, faster than IT can. In-house IT teams can spend weeks or even months in testing, deploying, and scaling an application according to the business user’s requirements. So where lies the solution?

Indiana-based Coactive empowers IT and tech teams with the ability to respond in such situations more quickly and closes the feedback loop between the user and the developer. Now the developer can build an application, or at least a framework of it, within hours. Coactive clients cut their development costs and get an end product in a fraction of the usual time. At the heart of their operations is the human experience; the true path to a successful business application.

“We help businesses best utilize an architect’s skillset, which is, allowing them to architect without having to focus too much on the nitty-gritty of coding,” mentions Paul Weiss, CPO of Coactive. Coactive as a platform was created to enable not only developers but even tech-savvy business users to understand the business processes and logic to create applications which solve critical problems. The platform is meant to strengthen the more technical individual who wants to continuously abstract themselves from the mundane and focus on what interests them as a developer.

With Coactive, users can provide feedback by continuously using an application even just for test data, allowing the developer to incorporate that feedback into the application in real time—no costly downtime. What adds special value to Coactive, in this case, is that it facilitates Interactive Rapid Application Development (IRAD). With IRAD, developers can collaboratively build applications at the same time even across the world.

A game-changing capability of Coactive is that it allows developers to make changes in software or code in a traditional software development, and to test it immediately without having to change their workflow routine. This significantly increases the feedback loop in the developer’s build-deploy-test cycle. “We essentially turn a 20- or 30-second software development operation to a two-second operation, which increases the overall production,” says Eric Kachelmeyer, CTO of Coactive. Coactive implements technology that would be interminably useful in keeping ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving low-code, no-code workspace.

Coactive’s internal utilization of an Agile-based Scrum methodology allows for rapid changes to be made. Additionally, for customers that require a strict Waterfall technique, the company offers a set of Waterfall-driven processes where they run the full gamut of the Waterfall methodology. “The platform isn't prescriptive; it doesn't dictate that you have to use a particular methodology,” says Weiss. In one instance, the development platform was sought by a food producer that needed to manage their digital assets. Furthermore, they struggled with the user experience aspect. Coactive built them a functional prototype in about a week. With rapid iterations, they carried out development in the client’s presence, building in all the suggestions instantly. The client went from not knowing how to gauge their users’ experience to having a usable prototype incredibly quickly, which helped in justifying their plan to their internal IT.
Coactive’s long-term vision is to provide a potent Agile platform with an interactive design that will help deliver sustainable solutions bolstering an organization’s future growth.