Tangent Works
How we helped Tangent Works improve software quality and engineering practices
It takes a team of data scientists hours or days to make accurate predictions based on historical time series. Tangent Works' TIM engine can do that automatically and in real-time. As a deep-tech company, Tangent Works faced a familiar struggle.
Overview
It takes a team of data scientists hours or days to make accurate predictions based on historical time series. Tangent Works' TIM engine can do that automatically and in real-time. As a deep-tech company, Tangent Works faced a familiar struggle.
Most of their developers are mathematicians or data scientists, not software engineers. As a result, certain vital software engineering practices were lacking. While the TIM Engine was overall stable, every release resulted in many bugs.
The Challenge
The CTO was at the center of the R&D department, acting both as manager and domain expert. This took up the majority of his time, leaving little bandwidth for deep technological and strategic vision. That is why Tangent Works contacted madewithlove to help out with engineering management.
While TIM is a SaaS API, larger customers prefer to run their own instances on-premise. Some of these customers opt to upgrade often, others only annually. Maintaining, supporting, and managing all these different product versions was time-consuming.
How We Helped
The first course of action was to adopt some engineering practices to address the perceived quality issue. The front-end and back-end teams were consolidated into a single product team, reducing the communication overhead.
The team then adopted a Zero Bug policy, organized code reviews, and invested heavily in test automation to keep the quality high.
In the meantime, a system was designed to take the CTO out of the day-to-day work so he could focus more on the strategic level. A developer was appointed as "captain" for each new feature, making them both manager and domain expert for that part of the product. This increased team engagement and maturity while spreading knowledge throughout the entire team. As a result, the CTO was no longer the bottleneck.
That meant there was time to design a release management strategy to decrease the cost of supporting all those different on-premise versions. The CTO also had the bandwidth to work on planning and designing a realistic roadmap for the coming months.
Results
Over the course of those nine months, the Tangent Works R&D team turned into a performant delivery machine that could release new high-quality iterations with confidence.
Giving the developers more ownership increased knowledge sharing and relieved the CTO of his day-to-day responsibilities, leaving time for valuable strategic work.
What they said
“Madewithlove helped us to establish a structured development process that resulted in better code quality and stronger planning. We were missing a few important aspects of the overall DevOps process, and madewithlove could identify the missing parts quite quickly.”
Jan Dolinsky
CTO at Tangent Works
“Software development is a living thing and thanks to the new process we could deliver most of the planned roadmap of this year.”
Jan Dolinsky
CTO at Tangent Works
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