White Fractal

White Fractal is a software engineering consultancy based in Oxford, UK.

Start-ups • Spin-outs • R&D

We work for start-ups, spin-outs, and R&D groups who develop their own software, particularly those with an emphasis on science or mathematics. We bring a wealth of experience in product architecture, technical architecture, and hands-on software development, from inception all the way to upscaling.

Software products are like fractals - there's complexity at every zoom level. We provide big-picture thinking for CTOs, Heads, and Tech Leads, zooming in from your commercial value-chain all the way to the finest details of your software — and everything in between.

We provide Reports, Designs, & Analysis or Hands-on Engineering services to help your organisation meet the challenges of building new products.

Dynamic Spectrum Management

We additionally offer consulting services from a leading expert in the cutting-edge field of Dynamic Spectrum Management, providing deep knowledge and insight for regulators, manufacturers, service providers, and GLSD database administrators.

Depending on your needs we can gather information from using your product, from your documentation, from your source code, from you infrastructure & build processes, and from one-to-one discussions with your staff of all levels. We will then bring our findings together to provide clarity and insight to guide your technical strategy, in the form of a written report and/or a presentation. We offer reports to fulfil a number of different objectives:

• Fresh Eyes An external validation of your product, your architecture & codebase, your engineering processes, or your technical strategy.
• From prototype to MVP Guidance on building your internal prototype into a Minimum Viable Product and start onboarding customers.
• From MVP to operation Strategy for expanding and backfilling your MVP, staff, culture, and processes into a robust operation.
• Freeing up innovators A standard problem is how your research team hands over responsibility for Product 1.0 to innovate on 1.1 or even 2.0.
• Value analysis Not all parts of a codebase are of equal value, and knowing which parts to 'work smarter' on is key to efficient growth.
• Pivots Efficient re-engineering of changes in commercial strategy — without breaking anything.
• Requirements Analysis Turning 100s of pages of science or regulations into technical specifications and designs.

• Bespoke reports We are flexible and can fit your needs.

Most contract software engineers are excellent at implementing the solution you've designed, but they often aren't great in uncertain situations when you need them to 'navigate without a map' — this is where we come in. We offer highly-experienced and versatile software engineers as contract resource for special projects:

• Project Rescue Is something unexpected stopping you completing on time? We become productive exceptionally quickly and can help 'dig you out of a hole'.
• Knowledge Recovery Has the only person who knows how something works left the business, and nobody has time to figure it out? Have you acquired an asset but not the experts? We can conduct 'forensic architecture' on a tech stack to understand it, document it, and hand it over in a maintainable state.
• Innovation & Prototype Development Helping to flesh out your ideas and turn them into working prototypes.
• Solving Really Hard Problems We thrive on these!
• Science-Aware Development Usually people can either understand postgrad-level science OR build robust, well-tested, and maintanable software. We do both.
• Interim Technical Lead or Head Of Filling temporary resource gaps in your technical leadership.

White Fractal has its roots in Nominet's world-leading DSM group. We have a leading expert on the regulations and engineering of TV White Space Databases who has hands-on experience building WSDB's for three jurisdictions and is the principal author of the DSA Model Rules for TVWS. We offer the following services:

• Consulting for Regulators If you are a regulator investigating dynamic spectrum management in one of your frequency bands, we can help with your draft regulations and coexistence rules.
• Authoring Regulatory Filings Consultation responses, FCC filings, etc.
• Database Prototyping and Implementation As further frequency bands and jurisdictions adopt dynamic spectrum, we can help to build the necessary databases (e.g. GLSDs, SASs, WSDBs) — whether to test out experimental rules, or to build for production.
• Database Qualification We are a neutral body with the skills and knowledge to thoroughly test third-party databases for qualification purposes.