Events
Futurice

The many benefits of transparency

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CEO

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In 2008, Futurice was at a crossroads. The team was growing beyond 60 people and it was apparent that the structure of the organization needed to adapt to our size. Up until that point, the culture within the company had been very open and empowering. After trying to put traditional managerial methods and processes in place for half a year, it just didn’t feel right. We decided to scrap the idea and travel along a path less traveled – to build the organization on the foundations of trust and transparency.

Inspiration for this path came from small companies, which naturally have these characteristics: trust is abundant, everybody knows the company’s situation and what others are doing (transparency), and …

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The rest

Five major trends driving change in the auto industry

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Project Manager

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In anticipation of the upcoming “Connected car” event in Berlin, let’s take a quick look at what people are excited about when talking about the future of the automobile industry.

Driverless cars

Driverless cars are closer than one might think. By August 2012, Google’s ongoing driverless car experiment had reached the point of riding 500 000 km without accidents. The most optimistic predictions say that driverless cars will hit the market within the next 10 or even 5 years in the US.

While car manufacturers are testing security standards and connectivity between cars, we can try to imagine how our time could be spent if our hands weren’t occupied steering an iron horse all …

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The rest

Futurice Scrum Club – Day 2

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Senior Consultant

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The second day of the Futurice Scrum Club had retrospectives as the theme (as chosen in the last Scrum Club meeting). How did it go and what did we learn?

Text by Jari Harjula and Jukka Edvardsson.

The Scrum Club held its second session at the beginning of June. It consisted of many exercises designing retrospectives of different lengths and goals, and a multitude of methods and exercises were brought forward by the participants. How can one facilitate a good retrospective? What kind of issues might affect the outcome? What are the key ingredients of a successful retro?

We started the day with a safety check exercise. The main idea of the exercise is to verify that …

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Events
Futurice
Software development

Our first code camp – definitely worth it

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Senior Consultant

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On a warm May Thursday afternoon, 27 Futurice people hopped on a bus that soon started making its way towards Porvoo, to the east of Helsinki. This kicked off the first ever Futurice code camp.

What’s a code camp? We didn’t originally come up with the concept but copied it, with pride, from our friends at Reaktor. The point of a camp is to gather together a group of software enthusiasts for a couple of days, with the intention of learning some new method or technology.

As a professional group, software developers are a bit strange. They often spend a lot of their free time working on things that are similar to what they do at work. …

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Consulting
Software development

The day when I started to listen to the client

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Software Specialist

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For the past five months, I have worked on a very interesting project. We have created an incredible web solution for a big, multinational client. The software has really been stretching the limits of what you can do with Backbone.js and there have been some almost magical JavaScript inventions. And… as it is a client project, I unfortunately cannot tell you much more about it. Bummer.

But I can tell you something: a story about how I started to listen to the client. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been working with clients for a long time. But they have been of the same breed as I am – primarily software engineers. Communication is easy when you share a …

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The rest

Futurice Scrum Club – Day 1

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Senior QA Specialist

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12 participants, one seasoned trainer and important and interesting topics, brainstorming, grooming, prioritization, mind games, group discussions, experiments. What is this all about?

We believe we know agile pretty well, but there are many things we need to learn to understand it better, use it more efficiently, and to be more valuable to our customers and to our company. We decided to put up a year-long programme to dig deeper into the subject. Monthly workshops coming up.

What is Scrum Club?

In true agile style we don’t show up to the first day of Scrum Club with a full agenda set out for us. Instead the instructor leaves it to us to define the expectations, goals and …

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Lifecycle management
Software development

A story about design decisions and legacy code

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Lifecyclist

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Back in late 2011 – early 2012, my project’s development team was taking the first concrete steps in one of our largest projects so far. We were figuring out the domain model and creating our data model. We already knew that the Customer, a core entity in the system, is conceptually a complex beast (singles, couples, divorces, name changes, decedent estates, companies, and lots of duplicates). Despite this, our chosen (data) model was vastly simplified – basically a natural person with very few restrictions on uniqueness. Creating a complete model incorporating the various customer types was deemed over-engineering. I agreed; it was a sound decision.

Fast-forward to 2013. Decedent estates and companies are added as a type-flag to …

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Software development

What is custom software?

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Senior Consultant

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Our clients often face a tough decision: should they implement a new software-intensive IT system using a “custom” solution or with a ready-made product?

Sometimes the answer is simple: if the requirements are rather general, the problem has almost invariably already been solved, and the obvious choice is a ready-made product. For instance, Microsoft Exchange will most likely satisfy basic needs related to email. But as the system’s requirements grow more unique, the choice is no longer obvious. This is no simple matter.

First, I should explain what a “custom” software solution means to us.

Custom is not about making everything yourself. A custom solution is a set of carefully selected individual products, each good at some specific function needed …

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Events

Afterwork: mONEY

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Project Manager

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As Ville stated we know that software will be the backbone of tomorrows societies. In the last decade all of us experienced one more sign of that development: The mobile revolution. Whole industries are still in the process of learning how to become mobile, refining their first steps and reaping the benefits.

One aspect of the mobile revolution in particular is shaking whole industries: mCommerce. Retailers seeing people doing price comparisons on their mobiles and loosing customers. Old school payment providers are faced with fierce competition by phone based payment methods such as Square or iZettle. Online retailers see more and more purchases made with their respective apps and not their classic websites. Mobile search is going to generate …

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Consulting
Software development

Digital transformation is about people

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Senior Consultant

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Taking advantage of digital opportunities requires not only new skills from individual people but new organizational approaches as well. For most companies, the bigger challenge in digital transformation is not the technology being applied, but the organization’s ability to comprehend the needed change and act on it.

Futurice has been working for over 10 years with companies in very different industries implementing mobile apps, online services and business-critical backend systems. So what have we learned about digital transformation in the process?

Starting off

At the beginning of their digital journey, companies have a hard time understanding digital opportunities. Digital activities, if any, are ad-hoc and driven by individual people, often without a clear link to the business. In this stage, companies may …

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