SoftwareMill

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the architect at Paidy. I'm responsible for the technology governance, gathering requirements and setting up the standards. For several months I was also leading the work of the Softwaremill team at our company.

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

Providing support for in house development teams to build software supporting our Buy-Now-Pay-Later product. Eventually they became a team on their own and they are responsible for development and maintenance of several key services.

How did you select SoftwareMill and what were the deciding factors?

Developer skills and knowledge of the technologies we were already using - functional Scala, Kafka, Cassandra. Good insight into new developments in the open source community around these technologies.

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

Softwaremill helped us to deliver highly available integrations to sms, email and push notification providers. Also they automated several back office processes and helped to increase the developer productivity in other teams by deploying several useful tools. They helped us to migrate several services from the old monolithic environment to AWS Fargate.

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

Over the time it was 6 people, all of them were senior software engineers.

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

Increased reliability of Paidy services, easier development for other teams who can rely on these APIs.

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

They are a part of Paidy and they adopted our management style.

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

Their contributions to the open-source community, great enthusiasm, and communication skills are impressive.

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

None

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the lead engineer at a cancer data analytics company.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

They’ve helped us implement a number of applications to help curate and analyze the data that we deal with. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

The software engineers that we work with have been folded into our full-time employee engineering teams. They augment us just like any other full-time engineer would. We follow agile methodologies and we work in two-week sprints. They write tests for their code and they undergo the same code review process that we do internally. In addition, they contribute to our internal engineers’ code review process.

In terms of the products they’ve delivered, they’ve implemented countless features on our existing platform. It’s a platform that we collect a lot of cancer attributes into, and then we provide analytics out of that. They mostly help us with Scala apps and some Elixir apps. What those apps do is to ingest cancer patient data and they do an analysis of them — the SoftwareMill folks help implement that analysis and implement the ingestion of that data. They’ve helped us QA that data and helped us implement (extract, transform, load) ETLs out of that data. There’s not a stand-alone product that we’ve asked them to focus on. They’re just integrated into our engineering team as full-time contributors. 

We have a product that specifies all of the product requirements and that product team writes out the feature requests for all of the features that we implement. After that, engineers will pick up those tickets and implement them. The lifecycle of that ticket is that they will get the request and they will have some back and forth with our product managers to nail down the details that are unclear. After that, they will implement, test, and they will write unit tests. Then, they will go back to the product owner and get a product review on it. Another engineer will code review it before deployment. SoftwareMill folks handle the ownership of the task from beginning to end. 

What is the team composition?

Under my purview, I have Tomasz (Senior Sofware Engineer), Jakub (Senior Sofware Engineer), and Krzysztof (Senior Sofware Engineer). Overall, we have 5–6 people from their team who are working with us.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

SoftwareMill has a reputation for having strong Scala developers, and I believe our CTO had a pre-existing relationship with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around the range of $200,000–$400,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement began in November 2019, and we continue to work with SoftwareMill. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They have integrated into our team just like any other full-time employee. They show pride in their work that can’t be differentiated from a full-time employee - from that perspective, I’m super happy with them. In terms of metrics, correlating their contribution to our success is hard to do because they’re just one of the great members of our team. 

They’re integrated well into our team. The SoftwareMill team contributes just as much as anyone of my full-time engineers. They’re all high performers and we have had zero performance concern with any of them. SoftwareMill has been super flexible. Despite our timezone differences since they’re eight hours apart, they’ve probably finished close to 200 deployments on our platforms. Above all, they’ve been writing solid code that is extensible and maintainable. 

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

They largely use Slack, just like the rest of our team uses. We’re constantly communicating daily.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ownership mindset makes them truly feel like a member of our team versus a contractor. They show pride in their work that reflects that they care about the company's future versus just completing tasks.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

I have no comments about the areas they could improve. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

What has worked well for us is we’ve given them a lot of autonomy and trust, so that they’re not in a restricted zone when they’re working. They’ve never violated our trust and it really enabled them to be more productive because they do not have to work around red tape. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of engineering at a company that helps bring clarity to cancer through products that we deliver to pharmaceutical providers and payers. 

We have a real-world data product used by pharmaceuticals, along with an analytics one which we provide to healthcare providers that want to improve cancer care by understanding patterns of treatment within their patient populations.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

Our software stack is diverse and contains code from very different ecosystems: Scala, Python, and JavaScript. We also have important infrastructure projects that require their own skill sets.

It’s not easy to hire for such positions, and, even if we do, it’s a very competitive environment. We hired SoftwareMill to help us find the right talent and, more importantly, to work with us as a partner to jointly approach and solve the challenges we face.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I’ve worked collaboratively with SoftwareMill’s engineers on both of our products. We typically give them a rough idea or job description of the person we’re looking for, and they find the right candidates. We have interviews with the candidates on both sides, and onboarding is done about a week after that. Our setup is fairly simple.

What is the team composition?

I’m working with two of the team members on a regular basis, as well as with SoftwareMill’s account manager.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

I wasn’t fully involved in that process. I believe that they were referred to us through our CTO. We looked at SoftwareMill’s candidates to see if they were a good fit, and they were. Finding people in the US with the experience and skill sets we were looking for would’ve been extremely hard to do. 

The tech involved is very deep, and we’re dealing with complex and uncommon healthcare scenarios. We have hired a few engineers locally, but we’ve almost always had to update their skill sets after the onboarding, rather than finding someone who already had them.

With SoftwareMill, we found people who already had experience with our stack, which made things a lot easier.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost depends on the resource, and it can be anywhere between $60–$100 per hour. The total cost so far is $200,000–$1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with SoftwareMill in November 2019, and it’s ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

SoftwareMill has a set of engineers who communicate well, understand the nature of remote work, and work well with our product owners and managers. They’re a great fit for all of those reasons. 

Most of the time, we don’t have to look past the first candidate, and that’s a testament to how well SoftwareMill understands the market and the needs of the client.

There is some turnover, especially with staff augmentation projects, but SoftwareMill has given us feedback from time to time on what we need to do to retain candidates. 

We’ve also given them feedback on how to improve the process, so we’ve come to a point where turnover is pretty low. The quality of the work is very high, as is the collaboration level. We’ve been able to build an internal product in just six months using a single engineer. 

We were able to replace a product that was costing us $100,000–$200,000 and did it in a fairly short period of time. If we didn’t have the right resource, we would’ve had delays in shipping the product.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re mainly providing staff augmentation, so project management is on our side. Their team has the technical know-how and skill set to help us, and they’re flexible in terms of some of the timing. They’re on Poland time, and we’re on Eastern time. 

There is some amount of overlap, but their flexibility is greatly appreciated in terms of working within our time zone. They participate in all our agile meetings. We have daily standups, sprint planning sessions, and design sessions. We’re constantly in touch with them through Slack.

The combination of asynchronous communication and meetings helps quite a bit to ease any sort of communication gaps that may exist in such an engagement. They’re active in communicating any blockers or issues.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s mostly about SoftwareMill’s level of expertise in matching us with the right resource. Secondly, they have a great pool of candidates in terms of experience and skill set.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They have expertise in the more common areas, but there are more obscure areas where SoftwareMill doesn’t have staffing experience. There’ve been scenarios where we asked for certain resources, and they couldn’t provide them. 

The good thing is that they told us right away that they couldn’t help. I appreciated that quite a bit because we knew quickly that we had to make alternate plans. Other agencies might’ve dragged their feet, but SoftwareMill told us that we were better off trying elsewhere.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

SoftwareMill is a professional team, and they can take care of it. They prefer handling full projects on their own, but we haven’t been able to provide them that opportunity due to our own constraints and setup. 

If someone were to give them that opportunity, I think there’d be even more cohesion within the project, and the client would get more out of it in terms of overall value. We just can’t do that because we have a certain number of controls that need to be in place.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO of a company that provides software solutions for schools.

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

Softwaremill helped us with our Java code refactoring, optimizations and solving bugs/errors in the system. We had to reduce the load on our servers and improve the platform uptime and user experience.

How did you select SoftwareMill and what were the deciding factors?

Softwaremill was recommended by a trusted source as a professional company providing Java development services.

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

Java code refactoring and web app optimizations

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

3 different developers worked on our project in different stages of the development process.

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

There is less load on the servers and we see much better results in our monitoring systems. Fewer errors, fewer downtimes, and better users experience through improved response times.

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

We used emails and slack for communication and conference calls for daily updates. Gitlab for project management.

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

Softwaremill developers have big experience with Java and this has helped to identify low-hanging fruits to achieve the best results.

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

More experience working with DB optimizations might be another added value but was not an essential part since we have some knowledge in our team.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of engineering at Assessio, which is a SaaS-based assessment provider for the HR industry. We have a SaaS platform that offers psychometric tests for both recruitment and development purposes, to hiring and HR managers, but also for leadership development. We have in-house-developed assessments on the personality side of things.

We have a lot of history and experience in both developing the assessments on the R&D side of things, as well as in consulting in the organizational space, specifically leadership development and management consulting. For the last five years, we’ve also been developing our own SaaS platform to deliver these assessments.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

We were starting the process of building a new set of tooling. Right now, we’re in what we call the “potential” space, measuring candidates’ and individuals’ potential, and we want to move more into the development space, with a number of new tooling around leadership training and coaching.

We had some rapid prototypes made up for some new tools, and the idea was to build a whole new platform to deliver those.

What was the scope of their involvement?

SoftwareMill was brought in primarily for backend Java development, as well as architecture specialists, to help complement the existing team. It wasn’t an outsourced endeavor where we gave them specs and had them build us something and come back in six months.

We already had an in-house team building the SaaS platform, and a number of those individuals worked on the MVP platform, together with other consultants.

We’re leveraging their Java backend microservices experience, as well as AWS, infrastructure, UX design, and React frontend. They came in very much focused on the backend and on architecting that side of things.

What is the team composition?

SoftwareMill provided two developers. We had eight developers across the team.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

I’d worked with a couple of their founders on an educational startup in the US. We were all working remotely, and I was really impressed with them at that time. They left to build out SoftwareMill, which is a well-regarded company in Poland, especially in the Java and Scala spaces. We kept in touch, and I reached out to them when I was looking for additional consultants.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost was around $200,000 over the 10-month collaboration.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our collaboration with SoftwareMill lasted from June 2019–April 2020, ending early due to the COVID-19 situation. We’re based in Sweden, and the situation here is probably similar to everywhere else. At the organizational level, there was a decision made to cut all external consultants. I’d love to bring them back as soon as the business situation allows it.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I’m really happy with the work they did. They complemented the existing team, and we obviously have a number of great engineers as well. We managed to soft launch the MVP internally in late-January–early-February 2020, and that was an amazing achievement, considering the scope and objectives for that project.

Their two members that worked with us were extremely professional and knowledgeable, and they were experienced at working remotely. They joined the team and the daily standups, and stayed involved in the online discussions, using Slack and Jira.

They were very comfortable working in the CI/CD pipeline we had running, using git flows, pull requests, code reviews, and other standard agile methods. They fit into our processes very nicely and brought new ideas while also being pragmatic with documentation, balancing being software craftsmen delivering perfect code, and addressing the needs of the team and of the business.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

The communication was generally really good. They joined our agile processes, and they took responsibility in asking questions when they weren’t sure about the requirements.

They worked together with other members of the team, whether it was a product owner, frontend developers, or designers, to ask clarification questions when needed. We had a fairly lightweight agile process, and they fit nicely into that. Everything was as visible as it needed to be when working remotely.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They also came over to Stockholm, and they were good on both a professional and social level. Their members added to the team spirit, which is important when working remotely. I’m really happy with the work they’ve done.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s always room for improvement in technology since things are moving so quickly. Nothing in particular springs to mind.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

It’s important to include the individuals as part of the team, at least in the model we had. Clients should keep the communication up and keep expectations and goals clear while giving them space for creativity and innovation.

SoftwareMill’s developers really wanted to do a good job, and a lot of the onboarding was around understanding the problem we were trying to solve, not just getting code out of the door. They really wanted to understand the user problem we were trying to solve. Spending time upfront communicating that is a great way to get the best from them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the technical director of a telecommunications company.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

We needed to develop a portal for analytics.

What was the scope of their involvement?

SoftwareMill developed an analytics portal for our customers. It’s an onboarding process that allows users to monitor the quality of their delivery rate and more. Some of the technologies they used included Angular, Java, and MongoDB. They’ve finished building out the portal and now provide support and maintenance.

The SoftwareMill team recently revamped the portal by modernizing and updating it; this includes its code, frontend, and database. As new services become available, they integrate them into the portal as well. They’re currently working on another phase of the project. We’ll be rolling the revamped portal out next week to our customers; we’re presently doing in-house testing.

What is the team composition?

We worked with five people in total, encompassing two frontend engineers and three backend engineers, one of whom specialized in AWS infrastructure.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

We found a shortlist of companies online. The reason we chose this team was because of their experience in working with companies similar to ours. Also, we liked the fact that they understood the goals we had for the project.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested roughly €440,000 (approximately $402,000 USD). It was about €220,000 (approximately $201,000 USD) for the initial build and then we spent some more on the revamping of the portal.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together around July 2013, and the work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I’m quite pleased with SoftwareMill’s work. The initial portal worked well with very few issues. Their team provides excellent support and has put the tool into our customers’ hands to analyze their data.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

They do ok with project management, but it could be better. Regarding the budget, they did go over.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have good developers and understand what needs to be done.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

In working with any remote team, remember that project management is very important.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of R&D at Salt Security, a cybersecurity startup. We offer an API security product.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

We were in need of Scala developers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

SoftwareMill augments our team and helps with Scala development. They contribute to several areas of the project to make our build better. In some cases, they do the entire service themselves, and in others, they add to our existing services.

What is the team composition?

There are two full-time software engineers.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

The engagement started before I joined the organization. I know the company was looking for an outsourcing company that was known for their expertise in Scala.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend between $13,000-$20,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2019 and the work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

In the beginning we had some quality and process issues, but we had regular discussions and mutual feedback sessions. There was a bit of an adjustment process as the two engineers work remotely, but we’ve gotten better together. They meet their deadlines and the quality of their work has consistently improved. We enjoy working with SoftwareMill.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

We manage the project on our side, but SoftwareMill is an experienced and mature team. They communicate their progress and keep us updated on plans for particularly complicated features. We use both Slack and Monday, and we recently implemented TeamSpeak. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

We like working with SoftwareMill. They know how to work remotely; they can help compensate for the distance and detachment. The team does a good job.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When we wanted to scale up, we couldn’t. They didn’t have the capacity to add DevOps. Now they have more resources, but they were fully booked when we needed them.b One of the reasons we hired an outsource company is because you can easily scale.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice, with any outsourcing company, is to give SoftwareMill a clearly assigned task to build something from scratch. Then you can measure them on it. It’s better to have an early disappointment than to see it in four months after onboarding them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a biotech company that is active in injectable pharmaceuticals used in imaging, diagnosis, and treatment. We focus mainly on oncology, specifically in prostate cancer. I'm the senior director of data science, and I oversee a team of about 15 people who help analyze diagnostic images.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

We're working on a new data platform for medical images. We wanted to hire a team with expertise in Scala.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We collaborate with them, but they do most of the work. They started working in the backend, but we added a frontend developer about nine months into the project. Everything fits within a cloud platform, so we use a lot of cloud services as well.

What is the team composition?

At most, we had a core team of three, with six additional members who support the project. I set up all the meetings and communication.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

I knew about them through some research I did, so I actively sought them out for this project. I liked the contributions they've made in the field, and they had a lot of credibility.

How much have you invested with them?

I believe we've spent a little more than $200,000 at this point.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2019, and the collaboration is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They're a great resource for us, especially as we didn't have a clear idea of our final outcomes. They provide a lot of input, and we use their ideas.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

I often come into meetings with an idea of how to solve something, and by the end of the meeting, that idea has changed completely. I like that a lot. They're a fully remote company, and they're well-versed in teleconferencing, email, and Slack. They self-organize within the core team, and one main point of contact is available for most of our communication. We use the Atlassian suite, so we work in Jira and Confluence.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We're very impressed by their workflow, and I’m so pleased with our partnership. They're very thorough, and their documentation is excellent. They're always available, and they work long hours to accommodate our time difference.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They are very technical, so it took a little while to learn their mode of communication. That is fine for us, but their technicality could be challenging for other clients.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Our Slack channel is always open, and it helps to have a feature like that to chat or ask questions.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a big data architect for LPP, a fashion company and market leader in Eastern Europe.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

We tried to implement a Kafka Cluster as well as Apache Kafka streaming technologies on our own. But we failed and needed to outsource those competencies.

What was the scope of their involvement?

During the three-month project, our goal was to build a streaming infrastructure to process data in real time for our big data analytics. Kafka Cluster was constructed on a Kafka on Kubernetes platform, and we also used Kafka String API. We had different databases, such as Redis and MySQL. For analytics, we used BigQuery. SoftwareMill built the infrastructure that is connected to our sources on premises and transfer the data in real time to the Google Cloud.

What is the team composition?

We worked directly with two people from their team. In this project, we had a DevOps engineer and a Java programmer.

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

SoftwareMill is a certified partner of Confluence, which is the company behind Kafka technology.

How much have you invested in them?

We spent between $25,000–$50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with SoftwareMill on this project from February–May 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We just started to deploy machine learning algorithms, but thanks to the infrastructure, we’re able to compete with market leaders.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

Sometimes it’s challenging because we worked most of the time remotely, but we’ve had three onsite visits when they came to our headquarters for two days each time. Overall, I feel that our engagement was positive. SoftwareMill was responsive, providing us with internal files for every product and piece of software. When the project was finished, we were able to use them right away.

What did you find most impressive about them?

In terms of technology, their team was flexible. While we started with the Kafka String API, we had to switch to another API for a different set of reasons. Along with the transition being smooth, the developer and DevOps engineer were positive about learning new things. They stuck to the three-month timeline, doing everything to deliver a ready solution.

Are there any areas they could improve?

While the project was completed as scheduled, we didn’t have a channel to communicate small issues that we found as there was no place for small support afterward. Internally, they only hire experts and seniors, so they were unable to provide low-cost support after the project was finished.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a software developer for a Swedish online reviews company that offers information about restaurants, service providers, and the like.

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftwareMill?

I was looking to scale our efforts quickly, but I had difficulty finding suitable talent in Sweden. I hired SoftwareMill to provide remote staff augmentation for website development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

SoftwareMill works with the Scala stack along with Postgres and Elasticsearch. We rely on them to fix the existing code and build new features while working with our frontend and backend.

What is the team composition?

We work with one remote full-stack senior developer. 

How did you come to work with SoftwareMill?

I learned of SoftwareMill through a friend. Once I contacted them, I spoke with a sales and technical lead who confirmed that they could match me with a developer that met our requirements.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $25,000–$50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our collaboration began in June 2018 and remains ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our entire team worked better and faster with the addition of an outside developer. Our SoftwareMill teammate has brought many practical recommendations and enhancements.

How did SoftwareMill perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate very well with our developer. We hold morning stand-ups, and we feel as though he is completely integrated with our team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

This experience has been my first time working with an outsourced development team. I’ve been impressed by how easily they acclimated to our in-house technology and practices.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t identify anything needing improvement at this time.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would advise future customers to specify what their developer will be doing on a day-to-day basis so that they have a better idea of what to expect from the engagement.