Rich Campbell, Co-Founder & President, discusses how managing expectations impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Anthony Overkamp, Creative Director, discusses how working with existing designs impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Brian Dukes, CTO, discusses how DevOps automation impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Whether connecting an Association Management System (AMS) with an internal database or an e-commerce platform with a 3rd party service, integration is a major part of software projects. Centralizing data and automating decision making, done well, can pay back dividends, in addition to the improved customer and employee satisfaction when everything just fits together automatically. A professional team with a diversity of skills can save integration projects from getting off on the wrong foot, focusing on delivering tangible value and working results.

At Engage, we believe that great software isn’t just built, it’s refined. One of the key practices in our workflow is the retrospective, a dedicated time for teams to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve. But what exactly is a retrospective, and why does it matter to our teams and clients?

A business’s website is more than just an online presence, it’s a critical driver of growth, customer engagement, and brand reputation. Yet, many organizations overlook a vital component of their digital strategy: accessibility. An accessible website ensures that all users, including those with visual, auditory, cognitive, or motor impairments, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with online content. Often viewed merely as a legal requirement, accessibility should instead be embraced as a strategic advantage that enhances inclusivity, expands audience reach, and strengthens overall impact.

Creating successful tech products is about ensuring great ideas align with real user needs. By grounding decisions in data and user insights, businesses can build products that people actually want to use– leading to higher adoption, stronger customer loyalty, and better business outcomes. Research-driven design ensures product market fit, enhances user experience, and encourages adoption. It also saves time and budget in the long term and builds brand loyalty. Understanding your goals and the problem you are trying to solve will help you choose the right research methods at each stage of development.

DevOps is an approach to creating software which works to reduce the gap between coding and deploying, allowing the same team which created the code to deploy and monitor the application, generally through automating much of that deployment and monitoring process. In order to achieve the strong outcomes associated with teams practicing DevOps, the DORA Core model highlights building capabilities in the following categories: Climate of Learning, Fast Flow, and Fast Feedback.

Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

You know your product/business better than anyone else. Working directly with your design and development team helps them to design and build specific features and functionality around your exact needs. When your business needs change, having software built upon a flexible foundation can allow your product to quickly meet the challenge, whether that’s scaling, increased security, or an entirely new integration or product line. By starting with a custom approach to your business’ software, you have full control over the direction and impact of your vision.

Released in 2002, .NET Framework introduced the world to the C# language and came to be a stable, productive foundation for many Windows-based applications, including web sites through the ASP.NET framework. A new cross-platform version of .NET (originally called .NET Core, and now just .NET) was released in 2016, which saw the lion’s share of investment from Microsoft. .NET Framework had its last major release in 2019 (version 4.8), with 4.8.1 coming in 2022. Knowing the level of attention given to the newer cross-platform .NET, why would teams in 2025 choose to start new projects using .NET Framework instead of using the newest platforms and libraries?

Join Engage Software quality specialist Kristen Palm on Friday, April 4, 2025 at StartupSTL Summit where she will present on Quality Assurance Testing. Learn about different types of testing tools and software, best practices for implementing testing plans and more!