One of the very essential parts of our value proposition as a service provider is that we take full responsibility for building and maintaining professional teams. Therefore our customers does not need to care about how teams are built, managed and their knowledge is maintained.

For that reason, we developed robust processes which aim on ensuring fast learning curve of our expert teams, ensure fast and efficient training of new team members and ensure knowledge retention and sharing. These processes fully utilize experience we collected over 18 years of running our expert teams for various customers.  

In our philosophy, we recognize several pillars on which our processes are standing.  

1. First pillar is talent development of our experts. We have dedicated position of talent development manager within our HR department, who is preparing individual development plans for every expert in our company and coordinates their implementation with involved line, project and department managers. Those development plans aim not only on hard skills of our experts, but also their soft skills. 

2. Second pillar is represented by our domain experts and technical leaders. These are exceptionally talented individuals, proven on many projects, who guarantee within our company certain technical competence or domain knowledge. We share capacity of those leaders across projects to ensure high quality and efficiency of our work. Support and training provided by those leaders proves regularly to be the key factor of success of our expert teams. Besides having company-level technical leaders, every project has its own dedicated leaders, who guarantee technical quality and knowledge sharing within the expert team. Based on current project needs the expert team may be extended or reduced, however the dedicated leaders always stay stable in the project to ensure continuity and knowledge retention. 

3. Nobody can know everything and therefore intensive collaboration within our company group as well as partnership with external experts forms third pillar, which enable for our expert team know-how and support they need. 

4. We understand “team work” as sharing and helping. It is part of our company’s DNA which we reflect along the complete employee journey starting candidate pre-selection within our in hiring process. In case our managers or leaders would recognize that any team member is not sharing or helping, they address the issue immediately and ensure improvement. 

5. Last but not least, proper project documentation is important pillar of knowledge retention and efficient training. We maintain various documentation based on project needs and agreement with our customers. We use modern collaborative tools like Confluence which allow easy sharing of the documentation and enables efficient collaboration and feedback communication over the documentation. Due to integrated technology stack and CI/CD pipelines (like Attlasian tool suite), we maintain links between documentation, work tickets and delivered code changes. These tools are combined with modern agile development methodology, which supports intensive team cooperation though daily stand up and regular retrospective meetings. By all that together, we achieve high level of project transparency, which further ease the knowledge sharing and boosts on-boarding of new project members. 

Having an innovative idea is one thing, but bringing it to life is another. Although it may not seem like it, a lot of people have good ideas. But that is usually where it ends. The hard part starts when you decide to bring the idea to life.

And that’s what we are here for. We want to help you realize your idea. Do you have a project that could break down the walls that we face today? Apply to Falling Walls Lab.

Falling Walls Lab is a never-growing network of the most ambitious and forward-thinking minds that aims to deal with the biggest challenges on the planet. It stands for the freedom of thought and scientific research, and for making ground-breaking ideas accessible to society.

Falling Walls Lab is now running an international competition where you can present your project or solution to a problem in 3 minutes. By participating you can open the door to the world, win 1.000 euros and go to the global final in Berlin. Apply by 30 June here and attend the event on 13 September 2022 in Prague.

As sponsoring partner, we are looking forward to your ideas and will keep our fingers crossed.

We are very proud of our colleagues, who are constantly learning and working on themselves. It is thanks to them that we have had many successful projects. For this reason, we would like to present you a certificate that our colleagues have completed – Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering. Possessing an IREB-certification has a main impact for the German, Austrian and Swiss market – for xitee it is a big advantage to have Analysts with this certification!

About the certificate

The Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering (CPRE) is a personal certificate which is suitable for people working in Requirements Engineering, Business Analysis and Testing. This certificate will improve their professional knowledge. Only an independent training providers teach the contents. The certificate does not expire, it has lifetime validity.

Who issues the certification?

The scheme of the certificate is developed by the IREB. IREB, the International Requirements Engineering Board, a non-profit organization, is the provider of the CPRE certification scheme. The board consists of leading RE representatives, who come from science, research, industry and consulting. 

What does one of our team members say about the certification?

“In the field of business analysis this is not the only type of certification, there is also the BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) certification which I also have got, but with an IREB certificate we are able to compete on the German market. With IREB I have improved my skill how to model processes using UML.”

And for the ones, who don’t know what an UML-diagram can look like, there is one for an ATM activity case:

We thank all our colleagues and congratulate them once again on possessing this type of a certificate!

UX stands for “user experience”. It focuses on the users and their interaction with the product. The goal of UX design at xitee is to give our clients and developers a realistic view of the solution before it is actually created. This gives them a better idea and understanding of the look and feel, interactions, features, accessibility on different devices and platforms, and functionality of the software. This can ultimately save significant financial resources.

UI design is more specifically concerned with the “user interface”, which is the graphical layout of the solution. This includes screen layouts, transitions, interface animations and every single micro-interaction. It also includes colours, buttons that users click on, texts, images, sliders, text entry fields and all other items that the user interacts with.

Our approach:

We follow a user-oriented approach to create highly functional and affordable products for our customers. In the first phase, we learn and get to know the customer’s business requirements. Specifically, this means understanding the context in which users may use the solution. In the second phase, we create the design. The outputs are then evaluated based on user requirements. We perform these phases in iterations until the evaluation results are satisfactory. The last phase is then the implementation of the final designs.

tuned on Macbook

The benefits of good UX/UI design lead to:

  • reduction of development costs
  • increase the quality of the solution (by creating user journeys and incorporating customer feedback)
  • a realistic idea of the final product
  • increase customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty
  • building the customer’s brand (by incorporating the company’s design and logo)
  • higher Google search engine rankings (because customers have longer interaction with a UX-optimised website)

xitee offers:

  • User journeys: a user journey is a visualisation of the process a person goes through to accomplish an intended task. It is usually presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts with a product. Our goal is to study your users, understand their behavior, and design a user journey that allows users to achieve their desired tasks with minimal effort.
  • Wireframes: wireframes represent the path users take when interacting with a website or application, including user interface elements such as buttons or images.
  • Mockups: mockups are the last preview of the final version of the product, allowing clients or users to get to know the overall design of the product before its development.
  • Prototypes: prototypes are interactive mockups – final versions of the product that are clickable and allow you to test the main way the product interacts, also before its actual development.
  • Post-launch metrics analysis: metrics are signals that show whether our UX strategy is working. Using metrics is the key to tracking changes over time. We can help you set up and use analytics tools like Google analytics or Piwik.

Since the pandemic situation of Covid-19, digitalisation has become more important. Companies are now facing the questions such as how to provide personalised and confidential advice online? How to close a valid contract directly during an online meeting? What does the customer really expect during an online advice session?

Even before the pandemic, there was already a large number of online services, but only 34% of customers really preferred these services. Today, twice as many customers prefer them than before the pandemic. Digital interaction with customers has also increased dramatically. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the older or younger generation, ultimately everyone has been in a certain way forced into digital change. Companies are of course aware of this trend and know that they have to adapt to customer expectations.

two people shaking hands

However, it is important to mention that while on the one hand the use of online services is increasing, on the other hand consumers prefer human interaction more than before. Today, 83% of consumers prefer human contact, which is a higher percentage than before Covid-19. Moreover, customers prefer online services only in situations involving less important matters. If they need advice on complex decisions they seek face-to-face meetings.

For these reasons, there is a need to combine services offered online and face-to-face contact. Switch from purely online services to virtual face-to-face advice. This is what customers expect. According to Accenture, the linking of physical and digital experiences called “phygital” is becoming a standard. The competitive advantage in 2021 is end-to-end customer service platform that creates a secure and personalised dialogue between customer and advisor. This is why we are entering the Czech market with the LiveContract solution.  Advisors can share real-time documents, videos, configurators with customers in an easy and fast way without prior registration/authentication/downloading an app. This enables online consultation without loss of personal access. The platform allows the customer to make an instant purchase decision and sign the contract directly during the consultation without any interruption, in a legally binding manner according to the EU eIDAS regulation on any end device. What will not change in the future are the demands for simplicity, speed, accessibility and customer convenience.

If you too want to increase your close rate and offer your customers the best experience read more here or book a demo here.

There are six foundation blocks (Version control, Continuous integration, Issue tracking, Unit tests, Reviews, Code analysis) that ensure the quality of the software and therefore of the product itself. Various synergies between the specific parts enable transparency and maintainability. At the same time these components work as a toolkit for every single software developer.

Through the usage of a version control, each modification of the code is comprehensibly documented, and each version can be restored at any time. This grants flexibility to the development and allows a precise analysis of all arising errors of the software.  

The use of a continuous integration (CI) system allows a controlled compiling of new software versions as well as continuous reporting for the developers regarding any arising errors during the compilation. Additionally, automatically elicited key figures, which display the state of the product, can be generated and reported. Features and bugs, as well as milestones and project tasks, are managed through the Issue tracking system (JIRA and / or Confluence). This creates traceable and transparent development from requirement analysis to delivery and allows the creation of relationships between individual tasks or features. 

The Interaction between these three systems (Version Control, CI, Issue Tracker) as well as the interaction of the developers with them provides additional benefits, which increase the quality of the products even more. Any changes only need to be documented once, since the version control, issue tracking and CI systems automatically transfer the modifications. Because of this automatic transfer to the Issue Tracking System, every change is assigned uniquely to one requirement, which provides complete traceability to each action. The developer gains quick feedback through the CI System, since each change in code automatically generates a new software-version.

The usage of Unit-Tests and the integration of these tests into the CI System allows a quick identification and debugging of errors, even while the software is still in development.  

Additional to this, reviews ensure that at least two people view and test the code before a component is cleared for further testing.

Internet of Things is more and more often being used in various fields and sectors and is becoming an essential part of our lives. It also brings numerous benefits such as costs saving, increasing effectivity or adding value to existing products and services. Thanks to the IoT, we can easily collect real-time data without having numerous people involved. IoT solutions save your time and money in a long term and help “normal” physical objects become digital devices.

The concept of IoT is very simple – it is basically taking physical objects and making them “smart” by connecting them to the internet by sensors. Once the device is connected to the internet, it can receive or send information (or do both). This can be done with different objects in various fields. We have experience with IoT projects in various sectors, such as the healthcare sector (e.g. to monitor and control medical devices and ensure its future service and maintenance) or in real estate (for example for room occupancy measurement).

The foundation of the IoT architecture consists of:

  • “Things”: objects which are connected to the Internet and monitor and gather information about their environment. They send the information to the IoT gateways.
  • IoT data acquisition systems and gateways: collect the unprocessed data, convert them into digital streams, filter and pre-process them so that they are ready for analysis.
  • Edge devices: in charge of further processing and enhanced analysis of data.
  • Data centers: data is transferred, stored, managed and further analyzed here. The centers can be either cloud-based or installed locally. This is where the data is stored, managed and analyzed in depth for actionable insights.

Our team has know-how and experience in developing and designing tailor-made IoT solutions perfectly fitting to your needs. Discover the world of IoT with us and transform your products and services to another level!

Introduction 

Any information that can be classified as “identified or identifiable” represents personal data. It could be a name, an address, a card number, even an IP address or a cookie ID. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) tries to strike a balance between being strong enough to give individuals clear and tangible protection while being flexible enough to allow the legitimate interests of businesses and the public. Compliance with the requirements of the GDPR is required when processing personal data.

Data protection is defined as a “legal control over access to and use of personal data”. More specifically, GDPR refers to “the protection of natural persons concerning the processing of personal data”. It is basically a set of laws, regulations and best practice regarding the collection and use of personal data about individuals. Information security is defined as the practice of defending information (both physical and digital data) from unauthorized access, use, modification or disruption.

In xitee we provide services to keep your data safe and secure.

Cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures, such as on hospitals, are becoming more aggressive and frequent. To eliminate any possible risks of your solution, we offer the service of penetration testing. The goal is to use the methods which are typically used by hackers to identify vulnerabilities that allow the system to be compromised, confidential information to leak or impair the availability of services.

Additionally, we recommend and provide the GAP analysis to evaluate your processes, activities, and procedures regarding the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001 and identify all necessary measures to achieve conformity to the legal requirements as well as optional certification.

Code review

Our source code review service aims to discover any hidden vulnerabilities, design flaws and verifies whether you have implemented the key security controls. We use a combination of automatic scanning tools and a manual review to check coding practices, performance problems, security vulnerabilities, such injection flaws & cross site scripting, security-configuration rules, integrated libraries, etc.

The first step of a code review process is to conduct an analysis of the application and creation of a threat profile.

This activity is followed by inspecting of the code layout to develop a specific code review plan for every application individually.

Subsequently, we usually use a hybrid approach to perform automated scans as well as a manual code review.

Once the code is reviewed, we provide you with a final report containing the found flaws and suggested resolutions / steps for improvement.

Gap analysis audit

Gap analysis reveals strategic and operative gaps in your company, which shall be improved. The audit determines the maturity of your information security based on the best-practice requirements of ISO/IEC 27001.

We are providing audits called GAP analysis to evaluate your processes, activities and procedures regarding the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and identify all necessary measures to achieve conformity to the legal requirements as well as an optional certification. With our structured best practice model, we protect confidential data, ensure the integrity of your operational data and increase the availability of your IT. The final report includes then concrete recommendations. 

Selected key audit areas according to ISO/IEC 27001:2013:

  • Context and leadership of the organization (management responsibilities, governance, guidelines)
  • Planning (including risk management)
  • Support (including resources, competence, communication and documentation)
  • Operation (operational planning and control)
  • Performance Evaluation (monitoring, internal audits, management evaluations)
  • Access control, cryptography and physical and environmental security
  • Development and maintenance of information systems
  • Security incident management
  • Business continuity management
  • Compliance
  • Continuous improvement

Penetration testing

A penetration test is a simulated cyber attack against client‘s computer system to check for exploitable vulnerabilities. In the context of web application security, penetration testing is commonly used to augment a web application firewall (WAF). The result of the test is a report on the outcome and recommendations for steps for improvement.

Complex IT systems collect and process data that could be potentially misused.  Since there is usually at least some part of the system exposed to the public e.g., a web server, it is necessary to assure that only authorized users can operate the system and that security precautions will not allow any unauthorized person to access any of the system elements.

System security is evaluated by performing a simulated attack on the computer system. This test can identify vulnerabilities and impact of potential security breach. Typical threats are for example system malfunction or overload caused by excessive usage of components available from the public network (API, web forms…), sensitive and personal data leakage or unauthorized access to restricted application functionality. The main types of penetration testing include external, internal, and physical penetration tests.

Our approach to testing methodology:

  • PLANNING – Defining the subject and scope of the security audit
  • SCANNING – Conducting a kick-off workshop with the persons responsible for IT, information security and the operation of the affected IT systems
  • GAINING ACCESS – Execution of the penetration testing according to proven and established standards, such as OWASP Testing Guide. Use of proven, up-to-date tools and performance of supplementary manual analyses/rechecks (false positives).
  • ANALYSING AND REPORTING – Results report and presentation with prioritized recommended measures
  • OPTIONAL – Carrying out a follow-up inspection

Benefits of penetration testing:

  • Testing and consulting by industry-experienced experts
  • Better assessment of current protection level of used IT systems
  • Assessment of established protection measures
  • Reduction of the liability risks which arise from inadequate security of your systems
  • Proof of compliance with regulatory requirements of established standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, industry-specific security standards and GDPR

Once any business-critical system is deployed and customers start using it, this system must be maintained and supported. The main focus is to ensure that the system continues to perform as per the specification. First part of the service “Support” focus on service availability with key principles of redundancy, seamless recovery from failures, minimization of time to repair and fault prediction and avoidance.

Second part of service “maintenance” is more focused on continuous updates of OS, frameworks, libraries (which is prerequisite for service availability) as well as adding additional features or triaging low priority “bugs” that don’t deteriorate the software design and user experience.

Our company has expertise in providing all three support levels. Our 1st level support is ready to provide you with a professional service desk with e-mail or on-call support. In the 2nd level support for instance we deal with setup and management of all needed environments (dev, test, acceptance, production) and infrastructure of the client, which could be either on-premise or in third party data center. A 3rd level support takes care ofresolving any bugs or other types of issues coming from the customer or the monitoring service.

We do not implement just a monitoring, but we build proactive monitoring systems capable to warn you before your clients notice something is wrong. We also become responsible for emergency backup plans and we support the deployment of your new releases. Our SLA (service-level agreement) including reaction times is individual for each customer based on the specific needs.  All agreed KPIs (key performance indicators) are tracked by our service desk management tool and we provide you with monthly reporting.

Our company also offers infrastructure support in popular clouds Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). On top of the implementation and maintenance of the cloud infrastructure, we can help you with the automation of processes. This could be achieved by Infrastructure as a code with Terraform or support of configuration management where we use Ansible.

Support & maintenance

Once any business-critical system is deployed and customers start using it, this system must be maintained and supported in order to stay updated and perform as per the specification. xitee provides application support and maintenance services to relieve organizations from these non-core business activities.

We have expertise in providing support on all levels:

  • Professional service desk (1st level support) with e-mail or on-call support, our team is provided with service management tools to track and report KPIs.
  • 2nd level support: environmental issues, conducting deployments, monitoring, patch management of the operating system and 3rd party applications.
  • 3rd level support: resolving any bugs or other types of issues coming from the customer or the monitoring service. Part of the 3rd level support is also application framework & libraries upgrade.
  • Enhancement of software with new software versions. We offer continuous development of new features & deployment of new software versions.
  • Backup & emergency plans with regular checks.

Our service hours as well as other parts of the service-level agreement (SLA) including reaction and solution times are individual for each customer based on their specific needs.  All agreed KPIs (key performance indicators) are tracked by our service desk management tool and we provide you with monthly reporting.

Together with our partner HBSN AG, we can offer you a full cycle of support/maintenance and monitoring services based on your specific needs and preferences.

Active monitoring

The goal of active monitoring is to ensure that your system is available and performing to the level expected and required to maintain your business. It is especially beneficial for the systems which are integrated with numerous other 3rd party systems.

We do not implement just monitoring, but we build proactive capabilities to warn you before your clients notice something is wrong. The system is also capable to fix issues by itself and minimize impact to all levels of your infrastructure.

Our primary monitoring choice is Zabbix, a professional open-source monitoring system. In our service we provide you with:

  • Monitoring networks, servers, applications, and services
  • Inventory of all monitored components
  • Escalation procedures
  • Real-time dashboards
  • Alerting to various channels
  • Automated remote commands for problem resolution
  • Trends and predictions 

Cloud infrastructure support

The cloud computing model has changed the way that many companies manage their systems and resources. They could pay to rent infrastructure from 3rd party service providers instead of building their own data centers. The leading cloud vendors provide even more advantages than typical 3rd party datacenter. They moved to next level of cloud computing (PaaS vs IaaS), which leads to many new advantages such as ease of short time of infrastructure setup, contracts flexibility (billing in minutes, no long term contracts are needed), automatic updates,  scalability and many others..

xitee offers services of cloud infrastructure support which basically consists of a cloud setup, configuration, monitoring, and optimization of the components of cloud infrastructure. We specialize in a migration of on-premise services to the cloud. Our expertise lies in the two most popular cloud platforms: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

List of our most common activities:

  • AWS & Azure account management (security, billing, access)
  • Network infrastructure support (setup and configuration)
  • Implementation, maintenance & monitoring of infrastructure
  • Migrating Hyper-V or VMware to AWS or Azure
  • SQL database servers’ migration from on-premise to AWS or Azure

Automation, configuration, orchestration

Infrastructure automation is the key to reliable and efficient processes. Automation of processes that have multiple manual steps and they are mission critical become a must in modern times. Automating of IT infrastructure helps to maximize productivity and therefore decrease our effort and development costs. Our primary solution Terraform has following main capabilities:

  • Automation of almost all infrastructure is possible
  • Support for AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, VMware Cloud, Openstack, etc.
  • Infrastructure versioning
  • Keeping the defined status
  • It is open-source and no license is needed
  • Perfectly fits to our pool of DevOps tools

Configuration deals with the technical and administrative activities concerned with the creation, maintenance, controlled change and quality control of the scope of work.

The goal is to ensure that the configuration of system resources, computer systems, servers and other assets are known, good and trusted. Configuration management involves a high degree of automation to achieve these goals. Therefore we use the tool Ansible as an automation engine which has following capabilities:

  • Optimization of IT staff activities through automation reduced IT staff time spent “keeping the lights on”, freeing up valuable staff resources for business-related initiatives.
  • Reduction of a downtime caused by system outages, cyber-attacks, security intrusions, and change and configuration activities.
  • Optimization of IT operations reduces costs in multiple areas, including infrastructure, outsourced services and management software.
  • Ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.
  • Configuration versioning to keep the track of all changes for easy updates and rollbacks.

Orchestration is a way of arranging your application portfolio to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and achieving that your infrastructure is dynamic, easily scalable and cost-efficient.

We help our customers to analyze and prepare a plan for the transition from a monolithic application world to microservices. We design the infrastructure and systems for an easy development and fast deployment while keeping costs as low as possible.

To achieve these goals, most of the processes are automated as much as possible so there are minimal requirements for the operations team. We rely on the famous platform in the docker world – Kubernetes which comes with following capabilities:

  • Service discovery and load balancing
  • Secret and configuration management
  • Storage orchestration
  • Horizontal scaling
  • Automated rollouts and rollbacks
  • Self-healing

The world of IT keeps evolving and continuously brings new innovations. These changes can be both an opportunity as well as a threat. Therefore, having an innovative advisor who can help you plan for the long-term, tailor a strategy that fits, and uncover the right tech for your toughest business problems (no matter the industry), is so crucial.

xitee provides a wide range of services to help your organization’s IT effectiveness. Our expert services include specialized services such as digital transformation, business analysis, UI/UX design, project management and IT technology consulting. In the IT technology consulting, the goal is to find the best technology for our clients which supports them in achieving their business objectives.

These services mentioned above can be very beneficial both to the clients with an already existing solution as well as to the ones who want to create a brand new one. We also offer consulting on new solutions either as a part of a complete development project or also individually as a separate service. Our team consists of IT experts with long-term expertise in the areas of change management, software development and requirements management and IT service providers. We can advise and support our customers during the entire process starting from the analysis through the strategy and concept development all the way to the implementation and deployment to production. If required, we can take on interim management tasks as well.

Digital transformation

Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies in order to create new (or modify existing) business processes and customer experiences to meet changing business and sector requirements.

In xitee, we offer:

  • solution consulting where we analyze your IT solution and help you to make strategic decisions
  • digital transformation where we help you with digitalizing of your business. This digital transformation will give the competitive edge to your business
  • feasibility study where we analyze viability of an idea, such as ensuring whether the project is legally and technically feasible as well as economically profitable
  • process improvements where we compare your internal IT processes with the best practices used in our company and on the market. The area for process improvements is wide: quality assurance, testing strategy and approach, project management, version control, release management, IT support & maintenance

Business analysis

Business Analysis increases the probability of project success, increases product quality, reduces development costs and enables our experts to optimize customer processes to be suitable for digitalization. The usage of a business analysis comes into consideration especially for larger projects, with many requirements and rather vague scope. 

Our business analysts analyze the existing solutions with the intention to either enhance or replace them or define together with the customer the requirements for a brand new one. In order to do this, we can prepare and lead workshops (offline or online) where we go through the existing business processes and define the use cases. This process ensures that no existing key functionality gets forgotten, plus the experience with any existing solution are the basis for new solution enhancements.

Based on our findings, our team prepares, together with you (our customer), the requirement document and specification of the new solution. When needed, we can also help with the definition of acceptance criteria for the new solution to be used during testing. 

Typical tasks of xitee include, but are not limited to:

• Analysis of the UI/UX and the database of an existing solution
• Analysis & modeling of business processes
• Preparation and leading of workshops
• Writing and reviewing of use cases
• Analysis and writing of requirement and specification documents
• Preparation and summarizing of acceptance criteria

Development methodologies

Choosing the right methodology is a key element for the project success and saves costs. Many of our customers have hired us to help them get their projects out of trouble and this is what we are here for.

Our team consists of experts with a long-term expertise in project management. We can advise and support our customers during the entire process starting from the analysis through the strategy and concept development all the way to the implementation and deployment to production.

When approaching our projects, we usually use agile methodologies for their management. In some cases, classical linear models, such as Waterfall, are also used. The choice of the project management methodology is based on the concrete project, its specifics, and requirements.

The classical linear models (e.g. Waterfall) aim for a complete and detailed specification at the beginning of the implementation and are not well equipped to react on changes in requirements during the implementation. While for well-defined requirements these models may be efficient, real live experience shows that it is often very challenging for the customer to define the requirements well at the beginning. This aspect is solved by agile models, which expect that requirements will evolve during the project.

Waterfall methodology: a conservative management model which requires a complete project specification before the start of the implementation. The advantage of this model is that the overall project budget can be well estimated at early stage of the project. However, this model requires from the customer to be able to describe the requirements on very detailed level, which is demanding on abstract and analytical thinking. Time and complexity of the specification grows with the project size and in bigger projects prolongs the time needed to start the implementation phase. Disadvantage of Waterfall is costly reworks in case of any change needed during the implementation.

In opposite to the Waterfall, agile models do not require a complete specification before the start of the implementation. The implementation phase starts much faster and is organized into small cycles (increments). Every increment is specified, implemented, and delivered to the customer. Customer checks the increment and adjusts the requirements if necessary. Due to this iterative process, the customer sees the software growing by small steps and can continuously align the requirements to his/her needs.

Agile methodologies represent a structured and iterative approach to project management and product development. It recognizes the volatility of product development and provides a methodology for self-organizing teams to respond to change without going off the rails. The core importance of running the project in an agile way is to utilize the resources at maximum and to enable an instant cooperation between the development team and the customer. The main agile approaches are Scrum and Kanban.

Project management

We have a team of experienced project managers who are experts in agile project management, have extensive experience from dozens of different projects, and use our corporate best practices for the success of projects.

We usually organize our development team following the Kanban methodology and lean development principles supported by tools from the Atlassian stack (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo). This organization supports continuous flow of work enabling the development team to reach the best performance due to a stable focus. At the same time the team can very flexibly react on changes in task prioritization without a need of extensive planning ceremonies.

Due to its versatility, this team organization can be easily adjusted to a wide range of project management models, from conservative to agile. It also allows us to integrate developers from the customer’s side to the team when requested. On the customer’s request we can also organize the team following a Scrum methodology.

Standard project roles in xitee are a project manager, a technical leader, a business analyst, a developer/member of devops team and a tester. The project manager is the main person and a contact responsible for the project on our (provider’s) side. On the customer’s side, the roles of a product owner and a project sponsor are necessary. Having your own IT expert, who can evaluate our performance is also recommended.

The product owner is the main responsible person and a contact for the project from the customer’s side. Depending on a customer’s organizational structure, the product owner acts on his/her own (e.g. makes decisions directly) or coordinates other roles of the customer (e.g. brings topics to the respective management board for decision). One way or another, the product owner is responsible for defining the business requirements, approving the specification and accepting deliverables, coordinates all activities on the customer’s side and controls the project budget.

It is a decision of the customer how closely the product owner will be integrated with the development team. One option is that the product owner can stay separated from the team and provides feedback through regular demo and planning sessions. Other approach is when the product owner can be completely integrated into the team, taking part on daily stand-ups and has a deep insight into the team’s daily work. The general rule is that more agility and less detailed requirements require more intensive collaboration/integration of the product owner with the team.

The project sponsor is an authority who is accountable for the project and this person is involved in the project on the steering level.

UI/UX design

UI design deals with the “user interface”, which is the graphical layout of a solution. This includes the buttons that users click on, texts, images, sliders, text entry fields, and all the rest of the items the user interacts with. It looks into the screen layout, transitions, interface animations and every single micro-interaction.

UX stands for “user experience”. It focuses on the user and his/her interaction with the product. The goal of UX design in xitee is to bring to our clients and FE developers a real view of the solutions before they are actually made. This gives them a better idea and understanding of the appearance, features, availability on various devices and platforms, and functionality of the software. This can ultimately save considerable funds.

Our approach:

We follow the user centric approach to create highly usable and accessible products for our customers. In the first phase, we are learning and understanding customer business requirements. This means to understand the context in which users may use the solution. In a second phase, we are developing design. The outcomes are subsequently evaluated against the user requirements. We conduct these phases in iterations until the evaluation results are satisfactory. The last stage is then the implementation of final designs.

Benefits or good UI/UX design leads to:

  • reduced cost for development (no reworks)
  • increased quality of the solution (by creating user journeys and incorporating the customer feedback)
  • increased customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty
  • building customer brand (by incorporating the company design and logo)
  • ranking higher on Google (as customers have longer interactions with the UX-optimized website).

xitee offers:

  • user journeys: a user journey is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish the intended task. Typically, it’s presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts with a product. Our goal is to study your users, understand their behavior, and architect a user journey that enables your users to achieve their desired tasks with minimal effort.
  • wireframes: wireframes represent the journey of the users as they interact with a website or an app, including UI elements such as buttons or images. These are represented in a simplified version using placeholders.
  • prototypes: prototypes are interactive final versions of the product pre-development which are clickable and enable users to test the main interactions of the product.
  • post-launch metrics analysis: metrics are the signals that show whether our UX strategy is working. Using metrics is a key to track changes over time. We can help you setup and use analytics tools such Google analytics or Piwik.

IT technology consulting

Technology consulting services are designed to help customers achieve optimal ROI (return on investment) from technology through the fast and cost-effective optimization of their IT systems and processes. xitee brings the expertise, technology, and best practices to deliver secure enterprise solutions that meet both current and future needs while minimizing the risks.

We cooperate with our customers on our way to construct and maintain IT infrastructures that are modern, efficient, scalable, configurable, and cost-effective. Our main focus lies in these areas:

  • Architecture consulting: our experts help customers to carry out the transition from the outdated and ineffective IT delivery systems and architectures to a cloud-based infrastructure that allows implementation of new technologies into their software strategy.
  • New Technology adaptation: nowadays, companies need to implement new technologies in order to stay competitive and meet the demands of modern users while they also have to ensure the consistent delivery of high-quality of their IT products and services. We are here to help you with this matter with our devops team using the latest modern technologies.