Working with a team is always a challenge, and doing it from another country is a craft. So we sat down with Jesús Magaña, one of our experienced Project Managers to talk about remote work, teaming-up, and the best parts of doing home office. Enjoy!
What does “collaboration” mean for me? Well, since school, teamwork gets a bad rep, as it mostly means dividing homework between several people. A student writes an introduction, another one does the illustrations, another puts everything together and someone prints it at the end, right?
Okay, what does a Project Manager do? I coordinate teams of people every day, so we can reach the agreed milestones of any project at every step of development until we complete it.
There are lots of issues that need to be solved during a successful development cycle, that go from personal problems to more technical issues, like faulty connections, server troubles, to limitations I try to mitigate. You know, the usual “Ah, I can’t get this thing right”, or “We are missing this thing to move on”.
It’s said that a PM manages time, budget, and scope. In reality, I manage people, which requires the usual soft skills. How do you tell a client that something has to be delayed without harming the relationship? How do you bring an issue to the team and correct it? What words do you use to give feedback?
This already has lots of nuance in a normal job environment, where certain situations are more easily approachable when you have a team physically there with you, like going to someone’s desk to check a task’s progress, knowing who is present by looking at their seats, or being available for the team when a problem arises. “Hey, I want to show you this real quick”, or “Can I get your opinion on this”.
For a Nearshore development company like Scio, with collaborators all over Latin America, these situations are different. Bonding and communication have to be considered differently, traded for some advantages that not every company has.
After all, it opens a ton of possibilities in terms of the kind of talent you can work with, be it from your city or an entirely different country. I would have second thoughts about moving elsewhere to work, and the option to join remotely allows us to meet talented people with affinities to everything relating to software, which is great for the overall talent we have at Scio.
Also, more and more clients are trusting the capabilities of Nearshore development, as this industry is particularly capable of incorporating remote models of work, and needing everyone in the same office is increasingly unnecessary.
Now, as you can imagine, I spend most of my time on calls and videoconferences. When the pandemic started and we had to move to our homes, it was somewhat uncomfortable. “Oh, they are going to see my house”, or my wife or children would pass behind me inadvertently, but you learn to deal with that.
I know being on camera can be awkward. Maybe it’s just me, but seeing myself on the screen is distracting, as I wonder how everyone else looks at me. I turn that off and try to avoid it, although watching everybody during a meeting forges a sense of teamwork.
Using these tools well is important. In the apprenticeships here at Scio, for example, new developers get training and experience, and doing it online can be difficult. They see someone explaining something on a screen, just like online classes, and there is no sense of a difference between a school setting and a professional one.
The challenge, then, is communicating Scio’s culture to everyone joining us. Is necessary to develop a sense of camaraderie, even remotely, and something that worked for us is having leisure sessions where everyone, even project leaders, can mingle and play something together. We don’t talk about work during these sessions, the point is forming a relationship beyond that, creating the bonds we need to work well together.
Collaborating is understanding that, even if we have different roles, our goals are shared, with an attitude of “Well, I finished my tasks, and it’s only Wednesday. The sprint finishes on Friday, let me see if someone needs help”.
In soccer terms, if a striker scores three goals, he has achieved something great individually. But if the team gets scored against four times and loses, that was pointless.
Collaboration is seeing yourself as part of something bigger you help to accomplish, regardless of your personal objectives.
And you have to keep in mind collaboration with clients directly, the other side of the coin in Nearshore development. Every client has a different approach to every project; sometimes they join during every scrum each week, and sometimes they have more of a “Nice job, see ya’ll in a month for the demo!” attitude.
I prefer a close client; I can create certain transparency where they can see how your team functions with an inside look into the kitchen, so to speak, to see what we are putting on the pizza they want, asking questions, and requesting some changes.
At Scio, transparency is key. Scrum helps, giving the current status of the project to everyone involved, not only the leads. “I’m working in so and so, that’s going well, but this other thing has these issues”, and that helps us to not see each other as individual pieces, but as a unit building something together.
I like the way we are working together now. The team is more productive, and although I miss the old office dynamics, remote work opens tons of connections and made a lot of changes in my personal life.
Do you want to know something cool about working from home? I have lunch with my kids every day. I used to eat out of Tupperware at the office, but now it’s a break when I can spend more time with them.
You see, when your job is transmitting the culture of Scio to everyone collaborating here, dealing with people in a professional, empathic, and understanding way from home, your kids can see it too, and are probably learning something very valuable in the process.
Developing soft skills in other people is part of my job. For example, the responsibility of the developer is to give estimates of the time a task is going to take, and for a junior dev, these estimates are more of a personal wish than realistic plans. So, as PM, I might have a better understanding of the work involved, and I need to communicate that in a respectful and empathic way.
In other words, being a Project Manager today is different. You need to create an effective working environment, make a team self-directed without someone checking every step, while forging a strong relationship with a client with enough transparency they can see results every week.
Taking my soccer analogy back, to be an effective Technical Director you have to know the game, playing matches in every position possible. I’ve been a Developer, QA, analyst, and more, and having those perspectives are crucial to understanding everyone on the team.
In-office or remotely, the point is motivating the team to give their best, solving anything that gets in the way of achieving a successful project. Is transforming teamwork from a chore into the best possible way to work.
The show must go on: Developing a venue booking app with UPick
As the year winds down, it’s time to look back and celebrate all of our achievements of 2021, the challenges and the goals we conquered, and the clients whose projects we helped to become reality.
This time, let’s take a look at the story behind the development of the UPick app, which had the goal of creating a useful and reliable booking tool for both venues and artists, and how we helped them bring that dream from concept to a product you can use today. Enjoy!
What goes into making a good idea into reality? For the creators of UPick, it meant finding a reliable team that could build upon their idea, understand the concept completely, and offers the best technical know-how to bring it from paper into every smart device you can imagine. The beginning was simple enough; back in 2020, a couple of friends were looking into an area of opportunity no one else seemed to be exploring yet: what if you could simplify the process to book a show for a venue through an app?
The pandemic gave them a wide-open window to implement a solution for an industry that felt the consequences of this crisis deeply. Live shows account for nearly 50% of the music industry’s revenue, so six months into the pandemic, according to the World Economic Forum, shutdowns had already cost venues around the world 10 billion dollars in sponsorships and ticket sales, with no end in sight.
But with vaccination rates increasing, it was probably a good time to try and bring shows back, and UPick’s creators thought that an app that offered a quick way to reconnect performers with venues had some fertile ground to grow.
So, in February 2021 they started considering Scio as a partner, looking for developers who could create this app from scratch, decide the full scope of the final product, and make important decisions about the direction of the platform.
This was the first time our clients worked with Nearshore developers, and the advantages of having a fully experienced team equipped and ready to roll inside your own time zone became invaluable, keeping the costs of development down without sacrificing quality.
Since our clients had never been involved in a project of this size, constant communication to decide the specifics of UPick was critical, going from things like how to monetize the service, to the best hosting platforms to use.
Typically, development at Scio consists of a 5-step plan designed to arrive at a solution in the most productive way possible. Understanding users and their needs, as well as the objectives and constraints of the app itself, was Step 1. Step 2 involved analyzing the requirements of the app in order to trace a plan for the UX/UI and architecture of the platform. Then, Step 3 is pure Agile Development, up to the official launch, which was Step 4. And after the kick-off, is a matter of support to ensure the quality of the app, giving ongoing maintenance and adding features as a Step 5.
The Scioneers chosen were a Programming Lead who developed the architecture of the app, a UI designer tasked with creating a comfortable and stylish interface, another one assigned to create a search bar and review functions within the app, and a QA lead who would make sure everything worked perfectly.
Communication was key. Thanks to daily scrums, a core pillar of our process, we walked our client through the progress of the project, needing nothing more than 15 minutes every day to discuss the changes and challenges that surfaced, as well as what we accomplished, every week.
Here, we solved tons of questions born during development, like “how will a band schedule a show?”, “how will refunds work?”, and “how will the venues and bands make deals?” to more technical matters, like choosing a cost-effective hosting solution (AWS in our case), implementing login credentials from Apple, Spotify, and social media (including some necessary workarounds), to selecting the best payment processor.
Also, as we briefly mentioned, the business plan of the app had to be revised entirely once the booking process was decided, as Upick could easily be cut out from the deal between venue and performer, and our team took care of that.
The biggest breakthrough was deciding to make UPick a “progressive application”, where a web portal could function as an app with consistency across devices, like desktops and smartphones, making it as convenient as possible.
Then features were added, like the ability to share photos, videos, setlists, and even playlists from Spotify, and we had to rethink the way bands could contact venues as our understanding of these deals grew.
Progress went smoothly until finally reaching our Minimum Viable Product, where one of UPick’s users, whom the client showed a preview, managed to run all of their bands through the platform before it was 100% finished, which not only showcases the talent of our team but also made the customer base excited about the final product.
All in all, by September the app was ready to be launched, a whole project contained within the chaotic year of 2021, where Scio was able to offer the exact solutions UPick was looking for. A learning experience for both our team and our clients, we celebrate the effectiveness of Nearshore development, which can deliver no matter the circumstances.
The Key Takeaways:
Since communication is crucial to make a product succeed, choose a development option that can communicate with you at the best time possible.
It doesn’t matter if the details of your idea haven’t been ironed out yet, a good team will help you with those decisions.
Development time of an app, depending on scope, doesn’t have to be too long. It took us around nine months to bring UPick from concept to reality.
Some APIs are not very friendly, but there are always workarounds to any obstacle.
If better ideas surge during development, it’s good to always voice them. The schedule might need to be reworked, but the final product is always going to be better.
Here at Scio, we want to dedicate this month to celebrate all the great things that make us who we are, especially the incredible talent that chose to join us this year.
So we sat and had a chat with Bryan Breit, a Test Automation Engineer from Buenos Aires, in Argentina, and asked him his story, how he jumped from Chemical Engineering to Software, how he arrived at Scio, and what insights he has about Mexico and the puzzles of process automatization. Enjoy!
“Look, I’ll start with something cultural, because I notice a significant difference in the variety of dishes Mexico has, in comparison with Argentina. There was this event where we played a game of “guess the dish”, where little squares get revealed until you can see the whole picture, and I didn’t have the slightest clue about it.
I have heard of tacos and quesadillas, of course, but it left me thinking of how could an Argentinian version work but not much occurred to me. Most of the stuff we have is more international: pizzas, barbecues, veal Milanese…
Anyway, about being a Test Automation Engineer. I initially wanted to study IT but my family persuaded me to try at least a year of Chemical Engineering. I liked and finished it, but after a couple of years without much luck in the way of a good job, I gave IT another shot.
It was at a job analyzing oil pipelines inspection data where I tried to implement macros and other automatizations for the first time, trying to make the workload a little less tedious, because it was a very repetitive task, but required certain criteria not easy at all to automate.
But after a while, I got tired of that and was already studying Programming, when a friend in IT asked me why I didn’t try Quality Assurance, where I could start right away.
I applied to some postings and got a call from a large, global consulting company, where I learned some automatization stuff that I found interesting, even if it lacked the programming side I was looking for. In any case, I decided to dedicate myself to that, a sort of hybrid between both fields.
Now, at the beginning of the pandemic, I had been trying to freelance and started to get some job offers that could help me with that.
The first couple of interviews I had were exhausting because they required some long, in-person live tests, and in the end, I couldn’t even get the job. But I kept trying, and the third or fourth time was at Scio, which wasn’t as exhausting as the others because their tests weren’t live.
A live test gets you nervous, and you have to know everything by memory alone. I generally don’t work that way: you remember the things you use every day, sure, but there’s stuff you hardly ever use. So if I get stuck, I like to check Google and find an answer that will, at least, point me in the right direction.
Then, when I find how someone else solved the issue, I adapt it (because no Internet answer is going to work as is) and test it. In the end, it is more about the creativity you use to solve any problem than memorization, I think.
The Scio test was about a framework I hadn’t used before, so I had the time to research and implement it for the first time.
These days, I’m adapting to a new schedule [the end of Daylights Saving Time] in Mexico and I can’t say I do the same things every day. Some of my tickets are about designing an automatization test and submitting it for approval, checking other engineers’ code to make sure everything is clean, or sending my own to review before I merge it with other already completed stuff.
If errors happen (because maintenance is needed or something failed in the app), I have to report and research them, and that can get interesting.
It’s rewarding when I find a way to make the automatization work, helping the Devs find the source of the issue, or when I can improve the stability of the application by removing bugs and errors.
Keep in mind, this is the first time I’ve been able to do what I want. At past jobs, it was more about manual QA and maybe, if there was time left, some automatization.
Here at Scio is the first time I’ve been doing automatization 100% of the time, and I feel that I was well received here, cultural differences aside. I don’t have a lot of interaction with my Mexican coworkers, but when I do need to chat with my team at Scio it’s good I can do it in Spanish most of the time.
By the way, I’m also practicing my English a lot more, because, at my previous company, I was more involved with the Colombian sub-team than the American one. There, the work was more divided by groups, but here I feel more involved with the team at Mexico and Scio as a whole.
For 2022 though, I would like to find more balance in my life. I just can’t adapt to the pandemic; I go out being careful to wear my mask properly, keep distances and everything, but I would like a better balance to travel more, even work from somewhere else, although I know I’ll need a good Internet connection for that.
As a final comment, to anyone interested in Test Automation, I’d say “always look for something to improve in the process”. In QA, there’s always something that you can make better, but let’s go a little further: think how you can cover the entire process and make it more coherent, encompassing as many cases as possible without repeating them because there’s always something you can make faster, more stable and more trustworthy.
It’s always interesting to think about continuous improvement. You probably are not going to be able to make every Sprint better, but every few months something good should come along.
Then you can say with all confidence: “I made this better”.
The December holidays are the perfect moment to look back and celebrate the best things that happened this year. Or in the case of Scio, celebrate all the technologies that manage to make our lives a little easier in 2021, which is why we are taking a look into one of the most surprising tech resurgences: the QR code and all the solutions it brought to us during the pandemic.
It can’t be denied that, for a moment, the idea of receiving information just by scanning a picture sounded like something out of an old Sci-Fi novel. And for a brief period at the beginning of the New 10’s, QR Codes (and the whole idea of “Augmented Reality”) seemed to offer a preview of that exact future.
It didn’t turn out quite like that, sadly. Although it had its particular applications, QR’s never lost a certain “novelty” vibe, a gimmick that most of the time brought more complications than true convenience.
On one hand, the need for a special reader capable of recognizing these codes (which not many phones at the time included right out of the box), and a stable Internet connection to actually check the content was already a high barrier in 2011.
And on the other, integrating QR’s in any kind of visual design, like in an advert, was always difficult, because they almost never mesh well with any composition, so it’s easy to let them overshadow every other element of the image.
So QR Codes, although an interesting idea, looked like an artifact of the smart device boom of the 2010s, and by the end of the decade, the world seemed ready to leave them behind.
What happened, then?
If we look closely at this Google Trend graph, we can see how the search term “QR Code” had its first sudden popularity spike in years. The date? August 22nd, 2020.
We all know why. Thanks to the pandemic, we were forced to take distance from everyone else, and a lot of our normal interactions had to fall back on technology, forcing us to look for quick solutions in a time we couldn’t do anything else.
This graph is about the United States only, by the way. If we look at a worldwide trend, well…
We can see a noticeable growth signaling that QR codes maybe are finally here to stay. But beyond the pandemic, what does this resurrection means, and why has this technology becomes part of our daily life?
A story of highs and lows
These codes have an interesting story, because their popularity has never been uniform, and it has suffered a somewhat fluctuating implementation for the last 30 years.
Let’s not forget that “Quick Response Codes” have been around since 1994, as an invention of the Japanese automobile industry, used to codify the biggest quantity of information possible, while compatible with the notoriously tricky kanji alphabet (at least in regards to software).
This huge amount of info in every code (inspired by the grid of a Go board) made QRs codes popular, and little by little it started to see some applications beyond tracking auto parts: virtual business cards, instant Wi-Fi connections, and even the aforementioned Augmented Reality.
And even after this tech didn’t seem to have a bigger impact among consumers, it never really went away, becoming an expected feature of many smart devices which, along with better mobile Internet connections, made QR codes singularly well-positioned when the pandemic demanded quick and trustworthy solutions.
By condensing a lot of important info or giving a quick link to elsewhere without any direct contact, things like menus, information about attendance capacities at any place, or any change of services announcements could be conveyed through a QR code, making them an important tool to take care of our health.
And this late adoption doesn’t show signs of stopping; just as we can’t imagine a near future without medical masks or anti-bacterial gel, QR codes are now a normal part of our daily interactions in many places, probably on their way to becoming a normalized and accepted means to interact with our world.
That’s why we celebrate a technological solution that we took for granted at some point, or whose real value needed a very specific context to shine: when the distance between us became a necessity, a simple code and a camera gave us a way to keep parts of our daily life functioning.
These last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about something happening in the car industry of the United States. Many of the bigger automotive companies are considering a reimagining, becoming more of a service industry than a manufacturing one.
Following similar models like Uber, these companies want to go from selling cars to offering an urban transportation model where you can use an app to request a, let’s say Ford, and a few minutes later a car will appear to take you to wherever you need to be.
This is a really interesting change of paradigms, where the new goal is to offer a service that solves the traffic issues in cities like Los Angeles, where you have a 6 or 7-lane superhighway that at certain hours is completely overrun, because you have one person per car and everyone wants to go to the same place.
This resonated with me, and I think it’s some sort of inertia that’s catching up to us, and we are rethinking a lot of systems we took for granted. For example, our jobs. We first had a factory floor with a production line, then an office full of cubicles, and now we question if the concept of someone checking we clocked in at 8:00 am is obsolete.
Now, maybe my opinion is very particular and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the rest of my team, but I think that, for the software industry, the pandemic didn’t mean some radical change in the way we produce things; after all, we didn’t have to close the curtains and turn off the machines like in the manufacturing industry.
We had cloud systems that didn’t depend on a physical server in an office, which was already becoming an industry standard by the time the pandemic hit. What did bring us was uncertainty about what it really meant for us, and how long it would last.
There’s opportunity in every crisis, I think; the chance to reinvent yourself and try new stuff you never considered before. Lots of collaboration apps and software, for example, started growing and adding features and tools that they didn’t have before.
This crushed a lot of restrictions that we used to have, where we looked strictly to our local surroundings in search of talent, and everything outside of it was uncertain or needed some precaution to approach.
However, since the pandemic started, I consider that both for past clients and new ones we had since the lockdowns began, doubts about working with remote teams are fewer and fewer.
And on top of all that, the so-called “Great Resignation”, in which a huge swath of the workforce started leaving their jobs, trying to find better opportunities, a total career change, or just to question the current status quo that picked up speed in 2021, ushered the need to look for solutions elsewhere.
Now, many cities in the United States are living through a mass exodus because today we don’t need to be concentrated on expensive places, where few transport options and high living costs were the prices to be part of the software industry.
In fact, some of our clients are located in such places, and they realized that their workers not only can be in Wisconsin, Wyoming or Missouri; they are finding out the enormous amount of talent available in Mexico and other Latin American countries, who have no problem at all connecting remotely to collaborate together.
We can see that in our more recent applicants, who value these opportunities and are more than ready to join from anywhere in the world. Our focus in certain time zones that are not too far apart from our clients, but Latin America as a whole has opened as a software development possibility like never before.
So, what Nearshore comes to offer us is some transparency, in which a Development Lead can chat in real-time with a collaborator in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, or some other countries, as a full member of their team.
This wasn’t strictly something the pandemic changed, but it did broaden the horizons of many of our North American clients, and this new way to look at collaboration will not stop at this point.
Of course, this wasn’t the only reinvention born out of this crisis; we can see it in industries like Hospitality or Show Business. Things like offering concerts online, or trying to bring the full restaurant dining experience to home are part of the efforts to survive and move forward during the pandemic.
I think this is the new way to do things; many entrepreneurs are normalizing the notion that, if a solution doesn’t exist already, they can create it, automatizing and digitalizing many processes and interactions that weren’t like that before.
Solutions as simple as WhatsApp came to be adopted more widely and consistently, in which a person has to take advantage of what already exists, and possibly help to develop what it doesn’t.
Having all this in mind, what Scio offers to clients in the United States is the opportunity to release some of the pressure of finding good software developers, whose costs and demand have skyrocketed in the last few years, and we want to be an ally that brings the level of talent they want.
Because, before the pandemic, the big question about working with remote teams for many American entrepreneurs used to be “is it possible to find a reliable level of technical skill outside the United States?”
And the answer is yes, of course. A big part of the promise of Scio is doing our part and preparing the people getting into the industry so they are ready to work on real projects with real clients, in an amount of time we have been able to reduce more and more. In the beginning, it took us six months of training, and now in just three, our new developers are ready to enter projects in full and be as productive as possible.
This situation will undoubtedly continue and now, with remote work and home office being a normal part of life, we can do so with talent coming not only from our city, but from all of Mexico and Latin America by leaving old concerns about working remotely behind, which can only change our industry for the better.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we, as a company, weren’t concerned with this shift in perspective; we invested a lot of effort into promoting interactions that would let our developers feel part of a group, where not a single member of Scio is isolated, and everyone is working towards a shared goal, from wherever they might be.
So yes, I think the biggest change the pandemic brought to us was the ability to say, “let’s work with a team in Latin America” with total confidence that every person at home is a complete professional able to give his 100% without the need of somebody managing his tasks or schedules.
