About
We are innovative software developers
Our core business is to establish and service fully managed dedicated software development teams in South Africa, as well as deliver custom software development projects for our customers worldwide.
Who we are
One-stop shop
Lava Lamp Lab is your one-stop shop for software development. We can help with: requirements analysis, custom solutions, architecture, UI/UX design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, system administration, and support.
Subject matter experts
Our customers are established businesses and so need a competent partner to help them deliver business value in there in respective industry. Lava Lamp Lab can be trusted to give advice as knowledgeable experts in various industries. Allowing our customers to create efficiencies through digital transformation and software solutions.
Start-up to enterprise
Lava Lamp Lab is a software development outsourcing company based in Cape Town, South Africa. Our core business is to establish and service fully managed dedicated software development teams in South Africa, as well as deliver custom software development projects for our customers worldwide.
Our Values
Are governed by respect
At Lava Lamp Lab, what we do is governed by RESPECT. We hold ourselves accountable to our values.
Sustainability & balance
We believe that having a proper work life balance is important. If we burn ourselves out it affects our sustainability and ability to deliver. Moral drops and mistakes are made, which affects the quality of our work. It just simply isn't worth it.
Continuous improvement & learning
We pride ourselves on offering great service and writing great software. This wouldn't be possible if we didn't constantly look for ways to improve ourselves, our methods and how we offer our services.
Deliver value & quality
We have noticed that very often we're involved in writing software that is business critical. As such, the success or failure usually determines the livelihood of a business, and of course it's employees jobs and livelihood as well. Helping businesses adapt to change in a time critical manner just wouldn't be possible if we didn't deliver quality, and equally important, value. A quality system that provides no value is useless.
Honesty & trust
At Lava Lamp Lab we place a high importance on building trust with our clients. When things go wrong (we do our best to prevent this, but sometimes life has other plans), it's the trust that we've built with our clients that's going to pull us all through. Having said that though, it's impossible to build trust without honesty. Having as much information as possible also allows our customers to make informed decisions.
Long term thinking & relationships
We seem to live in a world of instant coffee. Buy now and pay later seems to be the norm. We recognise that businesses need to change and this change needs to happen quickly. However, the importance of long term thinking and relationships should not go unmentioned. The things we value the most took time, the things we got quickly we value the least. We like to form long term relationships as we believe this is best for everyone. The difference between long term thinking and also being able to adapt quickly, and not being able to, is understood simply by being proactive rather then reactive. We prefer to think and then act, rather than act without thinking.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
We believe that Albert Einstein said it best when he said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."; Or if you prefer Leonardo da Vinci, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." We believe that the simplest solutions are the best solutions. Not only are they, well, simple, but they also offer the greatest ability for your business to adapt, and not being able to adapt, we believe, is your greatest enemy.
How We Work
Our approach to development
Technical sessions
We are proud of our culture of continuous learning and improvement. We gather regularly for talks, workshops, and to brainstorm new approaches that will improve the way we work so that we may learn from each other.
Test driven development
Before we write any code, we write test code to establish the expected behavior. As the system grows, we run these tests to ensure that our software continues to behave as we expect and without bugs. We run these tests as part of an automated build process so that whenever we change any code we can tell if the application still works. We find that writing tests first, forces us to think about what we're doing, which prevents mistakes and consequently having to redo work. Writing tests also enforces simplification of our code, which reduces the chance of bugs. Requirements become easier to implement, and changes have less of an impact.
Continuous integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires our developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing our teams to detect problems early. As multiple developers often work on the same projects. To maintain the integrity of the software we write, we use version control and build automation tools to continuously merge and test the code we produce.
Iterative development
We build software in short, one-week release cycles called iterations. Working this way allows us to provide continuous value and adapt to changing requirements. At the end of every iteration, we release a new version of the code with the new functionality that was developed that week. This ensures that we are constantly delivering and adding value. This approach enables our customers to give us feedback early on in the development process, which enables us to adapt to the needs of our customers.
