Posts tagged with "Software Development"

We are proud to announce that DO OK is now a verified Pangea vendor. This means that we have been recognized as part of an elite community of the top 7% software engineering companies and through our Pangea profile, we will further our commitment to transparency towards our current and future partners.

What is near-sourcing? How to start a development project fast without in-house engineers? Why run an on-site discovery workshop? We'll elaborate on these questions further. Today Finland, Sweden, and Norway experience a massive demand for all engineering disciplines. Government figures show that at least 650,000 people work in ICT, rising all the time. As technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, the need for software, hardware, web, and embedded developers grows across the Nordic region. In addition to this equation, some available resources unfortunately only have experience with old obsolete or unfit technologies or tools - with a need for an immediate update, like with, i.e. Python 2, which is officially sunset by Python.org on January 1, 2020. Recruiting new skills is a time-consuming process. Finding the person with adequate competencies and being a match with the team is not easy. From the perspective of the result, it is often more important to bring the new service or product early to the market than have a particular skill in-house.  

Our team is among the few companies that were listed as the most reviewed IT services in all of Estonia

What is React Native? How does it work? How does it compare to native development (like iOS and Android) and other frameworks? We’ll answer these questions for you in this article.

Why retrospective is so important? How to run an efficient Retrospective with your team? Which retrospective techniques to use? Marta Maciaszek, Senior Project Manager at DO OK, shares her experience.

If you are working on software development, you are most likely familiar with project estimation concepts. In the project management world there are several techniques and methods that may be used for project estimation. In this article we will describe the most common approaches, share our experience from DO OK and tips for your next project estimation.

To make proper technology assumptions for your product roadmap, a product owner or business analyst is not enough. The process may get complex right after the first user story you try to debrief. In this article, we share our understanding of a Technical Architect role and its value to the project. Why do we need TA explicitly? How does it differ from having a senior engineer in your team? What are the touchpoints between business analysts and technical architects?  Continue reading, and you will understand why the collaboration between these two is crucial for successful delivery.

TechReviewer published an updated list of companies that are recognized as the top IoT development companies. We are very pleased that DO OK has earned their trust and has been nominated on this list.

In February 2020 PMI published PMI Pulse of the Profession that says: “Work has changed. So must the way the world thinks about projects.” We continuously need to improve our ways of working and develop our skills, but 2020 gave us a harsh lesson that we also need to be in some way agile. According to PMI, to be successful in the future, our organisations need to be agile, but also focus on the right technology and secure relevant skills. You can read further: “For the first time for Pulse, executive leaders identified which factors they see as the most important to achieve success in the future. The top three were: organisational agility (35 per cent), choosing the right technologies to invest in (32 per cent) and securing relevant skills (31 per cent).”  So let's focus on how the organisation can ensure agility in the management process for software delivery.

DO OK has been ranked 34th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Central Europe with 710% growth over the four past years. The company is driven by its mission to help create a sustainable future, which it believes will be facilitated through the informed use of its software.

Project management becomes a critical aspect of the delivery and role of a Project Manager evaluates over time. Software project delivery is more and more challenging, as organizations do not only want to quickly adapt to a rapidly changing environment and achieve their goals but also control project cost and timeline. According to PMI Pulse of the Professions ® 2018 there is a prediction based on the interviews and research that the role of project manager will expand and include also being: strategic advisor, innovator, communicator, big thinker and versatile manager.

In any industry, managing projects from start to finish can be challenging, especially projects that involve a team. Fortunately, there are guidelines to structure and streamline the process for better organization and more efficient collaboration. But, they are not enough if you plan to work with Nordic SMEs.

Organizations are becoming more and more reliant on business analysts (or BA’s) to help guide them through this digital transformation, examining data patterns and industry trends to identify best how to adapt products and processes in order to add value for customers and stakeholders.   But just what are the benefits of business analysis for startup founders and established companies? Why is it important to leverage the kind of learnings that a business analyst can provide for the different stages of project management? In this article, we will explore the following key benefits of business analysis for companies and startups, with a specific focus on software development projects.

It’s hard to overestimate the benefits of remote discovery workshops. Over the course of our work with many founders, startups and established companies building or refining more than 150 IT digital products and services, we’ve noticed how little understanding most leaders and project managers have of their own core values, those of their customers, and how their products fulfil those emotional needs. As the world pivots to working remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, running remote workshops can help fill knowledge gaps, build consensus between stakeholders, and deliver more value-driven contributions to project planning and product development.

During the previous articles in this series, we’ve discussed the discovery phase of project management, the advantages of running discovery workshops for startups and the product development process, and some of the reasons why you may (or may not) want to run a product workshop. Today, we’re doing a deeper dive into how to run a product development workshop, and what to expect at different stages of the process.

In the modern business environment, data has become one of the key factors delineating the boundary between the success or failure of products, established companies, startups, and all types of business operations. Collecting, analyzing, and understanding the enormous quantities of information (over 2.5 quintillion bytes per day in 2018) generated in business interactions and everyday online activities is crucial for any successful business.

Modern business analysis is more than just a tool for gaining deeper insights during project development, but also a catalyst for strategic planning and organisational change at the highest levels. Today, business analysis has become a complex research discipline, and the role of the business analyst continues to change and evolve. So, what is a business analysis and how BA bridges the gap between IT & business?

We are software developers, and that means we get to work with lots of amazing product designers, project managers, and startup founders to help define the values & goals of many great companies and products. And being part of a product or design team means that you spend a lot of time collaborating, trying to create better products in order to deliver more value to customers. When conceptualizing or designing a new product, every founder, manager, designer and developer should know when and how to plan a product workshop, why it is an important part of product development, and how to run one. In this article, we’ll discuss how to think about workshops, and when you should (or should not) run a product development workshop.

Did you know that only 1% of all startups turn into unicorns? Furthermore, it takes them on average six years to earn this status, and it’s often an arduous and challenging road. The secret behind their success lies in their ability to quickly alleviate their mistakes and ensure that the product they’re working on truly responds to customer needs.   In today’s article, we’re going to cover the seven common risks that startups face on their way to market success and we’ll show you how you can avoid following in their footsteps.

Constant challenge and learning curve. That's the attitude we take towards our team to pursue the company's mission - help to deliver life-changing software products for founders with a positive impact in mind. Recently, we’ve been recognized by Clutch as one of the top custom software developers in Poland and Estonia.

Over the past few years, living a healthy lifestyle has become the thing. The trend of apps offer health-related services on smartphones is overflowing.    Mobile apps and devices have become our personal fitness trainer and portals to wellness needs. Actify has been striving to help live healthier in small steps for years.

You know that you should write tests for your react app. But sometimes it can be difficult to start. There’re so many questions about approach, libraries, how to implement tests and more. This can be overwhelming and stop us from writing tests. So in this article, I would like to show you practical ways to start writing tests in your React app and get nice coverage, while keeping it simple and scalable. 

Do you know how software teams evaluate clients? What would you answer to some of these tricky questions? Let's break down the thinking that goes behind some of the common topics when clients talk to software companies.

Every company has its business life cycle and building long-term relations might have a bit different energy and course. We look for valuable insights from each meeting or event, and a lot of them are worth being shared.

With this article, you will find out how to create your first smart contract with Solidity and run your code online or on your local environment. So let’s set off on a journey and have fun!

This is the second post from a series of articles about broadly defined clean code. If you overlooked the first part of the series, which is about comments, then you can find it here. Whereas in this post, you can read about another factor that influences the quality of dev’s code: naming. I will give a widely described lists of todos and not todos in terms of the current topic.

This post is the beginning of a series about good programming practices and so-called “clean code”. It touches a very important element of our code - comments. By reading this post you can verify if you are coding according to the rules of the clean code when it comes to applying comments. You will know when and for what reasons you shouldn’t use comments and when they are accepted or even recommented.

Some jobs, positions or work fields must deal with a specific problem - they can be very difficult and hard to master, but they rely more on soft skills than hard ones. There are many of these professions, but as an example, let’s take User Experience (UX) Designer. This person improves the interaction between user and product. Specifics of this job lead to one uncomfortable statement.

This article is part 1 in a two-part series about setting up a productive collaboration with a software development company. The art of asking the right questions will help you to increase the success of your project and find the right fit for a software development partner.

If you are a project manager, product owner or a business analyst, and you are about to estimate a digital transformation project in story points for the first time, this blog post is for you.