Kadeno Solutions

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Chief Technical Officer of a startup, called Alkubot. We developed a product based on a smart chatbot which can be integrated into various e-commerce platforms.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Kadeno Solutions, and what were your goals?

We worked with Kadeno Solutions to design a microservice architecture, then develop those services and deploy them into cloud.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I knew the Kadeno founder guys personally and we discussed a collaboration months ago before we started to really work together. However, we interviewed multiple IT companies, but none of them were dedicated and passionate enough, therefore we chose to work with Kadeno by giving them a very small piece of problem that needed to be solved. After they finished this work, we were pretty satisfied with them, so our collaboration lasted for ~1 more year

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Well, it's a little bit hard to explain everything in details, because we had a pretty big system running on various technologies, but the main technology used was NodeJS. We had our own scrum-based Agile methodology. We did plannings/groomings/sprint review/retrospective every 2 week.

Developers from Kadeno were participating actively in each ceremony. I just mentioned "developers", but in fact we had one QA from Kadeno side as well, who wasn't just an ordinary so-called "manual tester". He did a pretty good job on raising concerns and asking good questions from client point of view. He also created and maintained e2e automated tests (based on Cypress).

Besides NodeJS backend microservices our system had Laravel and multiple ReactJS projects, therefore the Kadeno provided us not just architect designer, backend developers and QA, but also an experienced frontend developer. We used a polyglot persistence layer, which was designed by Kadeno as well (SQL db and MongoDB).

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

• 1 QA
• 2 backend developers
• 1 architect
• 1 frontend developer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

In our initial plan to lunch the product on a new platform (Shopify), we calculated 10 months, but with Kadeno we reduced the TTM (time-to-market) to ~6 months.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We tried to adapt Scrum methodology, but it was a modified version of that. At the beginning we did some experimentation to find what is the best that fits for us. We used mostly Slack for communication and the Premium version of Gitlab to maintain the source code, setup CI/CD, document the product in wiki, etc.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They were very dedicated to the product and this was very impressive. There were some grooming meetings when they had another but better idea than the PO (Product Owner). If it was needed to deliver in time and we were close to the deadline, then they stayed overtime, which gave me credibility against them.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

They could improve their knowledge on enterprise like systems.