About
A small organization with a narrow definition of done.
Kumkum Homes designs, builds and publishes its own software. There is one product so far. We would rather have a short list of things that work properly than a long list of things that nearly do.
Where we started
Fractions are the one thing every calculator is bad at. A phone’s stock calculator pushes you into decimals, so one third plus one quarter becomes 0.5833333: an answer that is both wrong-looking and useless if the homework, the recipe or the tape measure wants seven twelfths.
The apps that do handle fractions are mostly either dated, or camera-based solvers that want a permission, a connection and an account before they will do arithmetic. There was room in between for something with the polish of a modern education app at the weight of a utility. That became Fracsy, and it is the first thing we have published.
How the organization runs
We are small and we work in the open with ourselves: every project carries its own documents, including an honest record at the end of each build of what was made, what was dropped, and where the result diverged from the plan. It is not a process anyone asked us for. It is how a small team avoids having the same argument twice.
We are open to conversations about partnerships and commissioned work. If that is why you are here, write to support@kumkumhomes.site and say what you have in mind. We will tell you honestly if it is not a fit.
Four habits that shape what we ship.
Written down because a way of working that has not been written down is only a preference.
The specification comes first
Before the first line of code there is a brief, a feature list with acceptance criteria, and a design spec. They live in the repository beside the code and get updated when reality disagrees with them, which it does.
The hard part gets the tests
Not everything needs a test suite, but the part that has to be right does. Fracsy’s arithmetic engine is pure TypeScript with no dependencies and 191 tests, kept isolated from the interface so it can be reasoned about on its own.
Claims are tied to code
Whenever a product page or a privacy policy states something about what an app does with data, there is something in the source that makes it so. If the code stops enforcing it, the sentence changes first.
Scope gets cut, not padded
Features that are not earning their place are removed before a release rather than shipped half-finished. A settings screen full of switches that do nothing is a worse outcome than a shorter list.
One product so far.
Have a look at what that standard produces in practice.