Google and freiheit.com have been partners for many years and have worked on numerous projects together. We have repeatedly demonstrated our expertise in utilizing the Google Cloud Platform and successfully created solution running on managed services such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Data Studio, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Filestore, Google Kubernetes Engine, Memorystore, and Tensorflow.
In small, cross-functional teams, we have been building successful software products for digital business models iteratively and data-driven for over 25 years. Each Team includes a Team Lead, who is a software engineer themself and writes code every day. Team Leads are also usually trained as Product Owners and are appreciated as contacts for the Product Owner on the client side. A Site Reliability Engineer works with each team to automate all development and operational processes and establishes effective monitoring. Each team is completed by experienced UI/UX Designers, an Engineering Director for major technological decisions and a Commercial Lead who also keeps an eye on the team’s KPIs.
To understand the client’s requirements and goals and align our ways of working, we set up a series of workshops with our new clients covering:
- Different business cases
- Looking at complete customer user journeys
- Demonstrating possible solutions
- Setting up initial prioritized and estimated backlogs based on MoSCoW method
Our self built tool Revolution enables the teams to work autonomously and create reproducible results. In Revolution, an engineering team creates structured backlogs and prioritizes on an epic and story level. Those backlogs help the engineering teams to plan their project roadmaps more carefully.
Every team has a long-term view of each project and plans based on daily real-time data. Revolution also provides KPIs in real-time about the reliability and progress of a team.
Each challenge of the client is approached individually, but the methodology is the same. As shown in the figure below, our teams work iteration driven in an agile way.
To make sure client requirements and constraints are regularly evaluated and impediments mitigated, the complete prioritization of the backlog is carried out by the Product Owner of the client’s organization. All technologies are selected based on technical design requirements together with the Product Owner.
Automated tests and SRE best practices enable the teams to move quickly and to roll out any change to live directly. KPIs such as SLI, SLO, and error budgets allow the teams to prioritize quality over quantity.
Our methodology and ways of working are a result of many successful projects carried out on the Google Cloud Platform.
Using the Google Cloud Platform, we successfully migrated many of our clients to the cloud. With two of them we have published success stories to which you can find more information below. Many more are to come.
