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Another contributing factor to the ever-growing popularity of the cloud is the rise of remote work. Since spring 2020 with the pandemic, lockdowns, and social distancing, many aspects of our lives have changed. The way we work included. And today, almost 34% of employees say they prefer to work remotely and may quit their job if forced to return to the offices.   

Among organizations that choose cloud software development, 92%  are at least “somewhat” in the cloud. Meaning they’re utilizing multiple cloud service providers, for instance, AWS and Google Cloud Platform. That way, if one of their services is temporarily unavailable, they can switch to a working backup for disaster recovery.    

But with all the advantages, many enterprises face challenges when moving to the cloud, the top three being issues with the security, managing of cloud spending, and governance. In fact, according to Statista’s 2019-2020 report on the challenges and risks of cloud computing, 30% of business owners complain that roughly 30% of their cloud budget goes to waste. But it doesn’t have to. In this article, we will guide you through what is cloud computing and cloud native development how it differs from traditional software development, what are the key component of cloud-native development, its main advantages, and risks.   

Conclusion 

Cloud native development has been the talk of the town and one of the leading tech trends for several years now and with everything happening in the world and the continued need for businesses to go online and digitalize, it will remain that way. This can be easily explained, cloud software development comes with numerous benefits such as extended flexibility, scalability, effective use of the resources, and speed of innovation. However, it comes with some challenges as well. You will have to be prepared to deal with various APIs integrations, planning of data architecture, as well as dealing with security and compliance.  
Symphony Solutions, as a trusted cloud software development partner, can help you make the most out of this technology and make your cloud adoption a smooth journey.   

Principles and practices to implement your Agile methodology right 

How to implement Agile in a team 

When you are new to Agile and consider transitioning your team to this new way of working, start by introducing your team to the concepts and help them adjust while you are on your way of Agile implementation. 
As your team settles in, you may run into some issues and challenges. Most commonly when an issue arises it’s because there is a communication gap somewhere in the team and you’re not properly following the rules that you’ve set for yourself. 

Here are a few quick tips that will help you address this:  

• Educate the team. Introduce your team to the basic concepts and principles of the Agile iterative process, team roles, events and ceremonies, artifacts and tools to use in their daily work. 

• Define a clear team structure. Understand how your Agile team structure works, clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities. 

• Involve the team in creating the Product Backlog, so that they understand the scope of work ahead of them, be realistic in their planning, take into account delivery times and dependencies. 

• Follow Agile values and principles in your work, leverage them for your benefit. 

• Communicate clearly within the team, keep all the processes transparent and support efficient flow of information and knowledge. Anything that’s going on in the team that in any way affects the delivery of the project needs to be communicated and addressed. Whatever blockers or hindrances come up, they need to be sorted immediately to avoid escalation of any issues and failed delivery. 

• Take responsibility. Agile teams are different from traditional ones in the way that they are self-sufficient and don’t require excessive management from the top. As a team member, you should not only be interested in delivering your part of the work. There are dependencies and a lot of collaboration involved. Think about how you are going to deliver the product as a whole and work from there. 

• Improve the process continuously. This is exactly why you hold Retrospective meetings after each sprint. Make good use of this time and dig deep into why your team is performing as it is. Encourage everyone to participate and bring new ideas to the table on how you can improve as a team. Always seek to improve your performance, gain new knowledge and valuable insights, apply new knowledge to your work. 

• Implement feedback loops as an essential part in creating your efficient Agile workflow. You want to receive regular feedback on the completed work and adjust accordingly. It helps make sure that you keep a clear vision of the goal you are pursuing at all times. This way you will know that the team will deliver exactly what the client wants. 

• Choose the right tools. There is an abundance of tools that can accommodate the work of an Agile team and facilitate Agile ceremonies. Pick the ones that work best for you. 

It’s all in the word. If you want to be Agile, first you’ll have to be agile – in your work and communication, responsibilities and initiatives. Create a team that lives by these same principles and truly commits to what they are doing.  
So, what do we mean when referring to Agile project management? How do you get on with it? How do you even get started? Let’s explore your options. 

Scrum and Kanban: The two main Agile frameworks 

Agile can be regarded as an umbrella term for different frameworks, models and methodologies that have the team work in an iterative way and put a stress on flexibility and frequent delivery. Two of the main Agile frameworks are Scrum and Kanban. Your Agile team can stick to using one framework or combine a few as it suits their work process. In fact, in the State of Agile report 2021 the overwhelming majority of responders, namely 66%, reported using Scrum as their preferred framework and 15% use some combination of Scrum and another model.

Scrum is your go-to framework if you can expect a lot of change in requirements as the project progresses. It gives a lot of room for change and flexibility with some usable part being delivered every few weeks, or a sprint. At the end of each sprint, the client gets to see some results of the work done and give feedback to be implemented going further.
The Kanban framework presents complex information in a visual manner and is focused on evolutionary process improvement. It helps visualize the scope of work and avoid potential bottlenecks by managing the flow and limiting the work in progress. 
Let’s take a closer look at what the two frameworks constitute and see how your team can implement them to better manage their workflow. 

Getting started with Scrum: ceremonies and artifacts 

To have your workflow run smoothly in Agile, the team coordinates its work around Agile ceremonies and artifacts that tend to set the tone for productive team collaboration. 
Agile artifacts, which inherently belong to the Scrum framework, represent the value that the team commits to create and deliver: 

• Product Backlog. The initial stage of every product development is creating a backlog of tasks that cover the scope of the work to be delivered. As you progress in your work on the project, the product backlog may expand and change, with the ideas being fleshed out reflecting the client feedback. It’s important to be precise in defining the items in the backlog, know the scope of work that needs to be done, and have the project manager set priorities. 

• Sprint Backlog is a list of tasks that the team commits to completing in a sprint. The items are selected from the general Product Backlog. The team sets a goal for the sprint and has an action plan for how to approach the scope of work determined. Achieving the Sprint goal is a team effort and requires everyone to be on board. This means that everyone needs to be aware of their dependencies and focus on avoiding or eradicating blockers and bringing the tasks to completion rather than only keeping your personal to-do list in check. 

• Increment is a single step in achieving the Product goal. Each increment builds up to the entire project. It needs to be usable for the client and provide a certain value. The team may work on multiple Increments within a single sprint, and several Backlog items constitute an Increment. 

The ceremonies used in Agile are formally organized events purposed for the team to check the progress on the current Increment, detect and address blockers, adapt Scrum artifacts and adjust their processes contained within a sprint. 

These are the Scrum ceremonies, as follows: 

• Standups are daily Agile meetings that are a check-in point for the team when they can communicate and review the current status of tasks. This is the time to address any blockers or dependencies that need to be accounted for.

• Sprint Review and Planning are two events in Scrum that are closely correlated. Sprint Planning is when the team picks up the backlog items for the upcoming sprint and determines their goal, whereas Sprint Review is the team reporting on a sprint well-done. Or, more realistically, reporting on any issues that may have come up in the sprint and determining how to avoid them in the future. At this point, Product Backlog may be adjusted.  

• Retrospective meetings are another type of Agile ceremonies held regularly for the whole team. The meeting is aimed at reviewing the team’s performance in the finished sprint, acknowledging what was done right, detecting possible issues and finding solutions to be implemented in the future to improve the team’s output. 

Getting started with Kanban: ceremonies and artifacts 

The Kanban system doesn’t generally mandate any specific ceremonies that are characteristic of the framework, but rather uses a customized mixture of ceremonies. Kanban works well when it is used alongside Scrum. It is meant to optimize the flow of work in the value stream, which is done through a set of practices, some of which are the following: 

• Presenting the flow in a visual way. This is done with the aid of a Kanban board, a physical or digital board that helps visualize the scope of work and see the progress on the project at any given moment. The Kanban board is used by moving cards containing items of work through the stages of “To-Do”, “In Progress” and to “Done”. This way, you can see the workload, level of completion, bottlenecks, etc. 

• Limiting the work in process (WIP). This means setting a limit on the number of work items the team is working on at any stage of the project. Limiting WIP allows the team to better manage their workload, detect and mitigate bottlenecks, and complete the tasks faster. 

• Striving to improve the process. As Kanban is used in a fast-paced work environment with rapidly changing priorities, the team will need to continuously improve their processes to keep up with the pace. The team will greatly benefit from using metrics like throughput, lead or cycle time, etc. 

• Implementing a continuous feedback loop. This can be done in the form of meetings (Kanban Cadences) where your client get to share their input regarding the project, areas of concern and see what can be improved. The team then can analyse the input and decide on what steps to take to implement the client feedback. 

• Establishing explicit process policies. A Kanban team should have set rules for their work processes and agree on how to determine if a work item is ready to be moved to the next stage. 

As you can see, the Kanban methodology in practice has minimal requirements to make it work. Within the Kanban framework, there are no explicitly predefined artifacts. Arguably, some consider an artifact anything that is generated as you are implementing the methodology and there’s some discussion on what is an artifact in Kanban exactly, but the methodology itself doesn’t specifically identify any of such requirements. 
When it comes to ceremonies, there are no fixed time slots to be used for planning or reviewing tasks and the workflow. There are however Kanban Cadences, a proposed series of meetings at different levels (team level or service-oriented). The team can decide on what cadences will be beneficial to their workflow, organize them regularly or on demand. 
Having said that, Kanban would fit best a mature team that feels comfortable working with all the flexibility that the framework provides, and in fact benefits from it due to the nature of its work. A Kanban team is a self-sufficient entity that evolves and progresses in its processes organically. 

Agile tools for successful methodology implementation 

It may be helpful to use Agile workflow tools to accommodate your team. These can be web applications and services to facilitate efficient team communication, task tracking, file sharing and storage that allows multiple team members to work on files simultaneously. Generally, the team picks a combination of tools and leverages it to get the most out of available functionality and streamline the work processes. 
Here is a comprehensive list of tools that you might want to consider using for your team. Of course, you may discover that your team prefers something different and stick to that. 

• Jira is a task management tool that is widely used for tracking progress in a sprint. It has a Kanban board where the team can visually show their status with basic workflow states like To Do, In Progress, Under Review, Done. 

• MS SharePoint is a web-based platform for team collaboration that is integrated with MS Office.  

• Google Docs is similar to SharePoint but it’s powered by Google and can be used independently with your already existing Gmail account. 

• Bugzilla is a bug-tracking tool specifically targeted at assisting in the development process, mostly used by test and software engineers.

Summary 

Establishing an Agile development workflow can become the competitive advantage that will help you get more business and increase the satisfaction of your already existing clients. Developing workflow processes with Agile at heart, helped Casumo to get better results through improving collaboration with technical teams and being consistent when delivering value to the customer.  

With the integrated Agile in practice, the teams are able to create a product that hits just the right spot when it comes to customer’s needs and wants and they do it fast. If you want to follow the lead and turn your team Agile, consider inviting an expert to provide Agile implementation consultancy and mentoring to help you get the processes going and support you through the transitional period. You may find yourself at the start of an exciting journey that will eventually come to change the core essence of the way you work. It takes only a few days or weeks to establish the Agile process but it takes months or even years to master it and make the team fluent in operating within it. But once you’ve got it, you’ll never want to go back. 

When creating mobile applications for gaming and betting, good UX design is important as strong user engagement has a direct bearing on gaming revenue and the life time value. iGaming products cater to a broad range of bettors, whether they want to place a few bets while waiting in line or are a dedicated long-time player. However, there are still specific challenges that come with the industry, as gaming app presents more stakes and at the end of the day your app user wants to get the enjoyment for their money’s worth. 

In an abundance of online gaming and gambling apps presented in a pool of competition, proper and thoroughly thought-through UX design impacts much of the app’s success as it affects customer engagement, conversions and retention. 

Mobile game app design process 

All games, whether they are free to play social games or real money gambling products typically pass through a similar series of steps from the inception of the idea to when it’s ready to be released ´into the wild´ to be used by customers. Casino game app design is no different in this regard. Here are the essential steps of the mobile game design process for any kind of the app: 

• Research the market and competitors. The mobile app market is already over saturated and competition may be fierce. Proper market research is the first essential step in your game design journey. Know what is presented on the market, what is popular, what is trending, who is your competition, etc. 

• Who are your players? Researching the target audience is an important step, even more so in UX design for mobile games. Get to know your potential players and understand their needs and wants, expectations, how they may interact with the game. User-centered design is what makes the game more enjoyable and desirable. It keeps your players coming back and makes them stay. We’ll talk more about it later on, but first you need to know how to attract them. To do that, you can create personas that would represent different types of player audiences  and help analyze how they perceive information and think.

• Game style concept and branding. You want your game to be stylish and visually pleasing. The design should be consistent and aligned with the branding, including but not limited to colors, typography, logo, etc.   

• Wireframing, prototyping, and analyzing user feedback. Designing mobile apps for iGaming is an iterative process that goes through the steps of wireframing, creating and testing prototypes, collecting and incorporating initial user feedback, and continue doing it on a regular basis. 

Summing up, proper UX design may be what sets your app apart from the competition and gives it a leg up in the saturated market. Although the visual component and functionality are important, proper UX is what ties them together to create an exceptional product and drive customer satisfaction. 

Symphony Solutions experts have substantial experience in the iGaming industry, developing mobile designs for gaming and gambling applications. We offer sports betting and gaming software development services that are specifically tailored to the domain that thrives on innovation, high stakes, fast-paced solutions, and continuous delivery to meet user demand for new betting applications and experiences.  So whether you are looking to re-skin an existing game, be it slots, casino games, table games, skill games, social games, pari-mutuel games or online lottery games, or indeed to create something unique, do get in touch. 

FAQs on Mobile Game Design in iGaming

So, what is a distributed Agile team anyway? From the sound of it, the phrase may just as well be an oxymoron. However, practice shows that even such things as Agile team management and distributed teams can be quite compatible, as long as you know what you are dealing with. 

Agile derives a lot of its strengths from the principle of continuous interpersonal communication. The flow of information never stops within an Agile team. You want all team members to be aware of the project status, possible blockers and dependencies. Product Owner keeps stakeholders informed. Whatever goes south in a team, there is someone ready to pick it up and carry on with the tasks, by all means necessary, and with their eyes on the shared goal of continuous delivery, constant improvement and growth. 

Agile is big on clear communication and teamwork. It’s what makes it possible for the team to quickly show results of their work, be it an MVP or a prototype. In some cases, like with MVP for SpoedTest Corona project, the client was able to see the first useable version of the project within just two and a half weeks since the start of the collaboration with our remote development team. Fast information exchange, mutual responsibility and commitment to a common cause – all this makes Agile development possible. 

In this case scenario, one should think, is it then even possible to have an Agile team when the people are not always in close proximity to one another?  

The answer is simple. Of course, it is possible and it’s happening all around the Agile world. Adopting Agile for traditional teams just as for distributed teams is feasible, as long as you set up your processes right, know what pitfalls to look out for, look at the example of companies that are already doing it successfully and adapt it to your company’s and project’s needs. Adjust for the specifics that come with being “distributed” and you’re good to go. 

Benefits of Agile for distributed team management 

Using Agile for distributed teams may be just the thing that sets them up for success. Implementing it is more than just ticking the right boxes off the list. It’s about adopting an Agile mindset that is the driving force in the company’s transformation eventually leading to business agility. 

Agile puts an emphasis on self-sufficient and organized teams. Every team member takes responsibility for the project’s successful completion and delivery to the client instead of solely focusing on their personal tasks. This is one of the key factors for distributed agile success. 

An Agile team is set to continuously improve and evolve. Each person looks at the bigger picture with one goal in mind – timely delivery of a working product. The trick is to remember that you are working in the context of distributed Agile delivery, but as practice shows, this is not only manageable but comes with its own perks and advantages. 

How to organize distributed Agile development 

Managing a remote team in most cases is not drastically different from working in co-located teams. It’s mostly about finding the balance, setting clear goals and deadlines, and accommodating an uninterrupted information flow between teams to manage dependencies. 

Remote Agile team roles and responsibilities 

The optimal team size in Agile is 3 to 9 people, which is equally applied for both distributed and non-distributed teams. The reason for this being that Agile heavily relies on constant information flow and communication and in big teams it tends to become complicated. 

Team roles in a remote team are no different than team roles in a traditional Agile team. 

Although, it is recommended to put some thought into balancing out team composition across locations. Generally, it is not advised to divide the distributed teams by function but rather by feature. This means that you shouldn’t keep all developers in one place and testers somewhere completely different. This would make it more difficult to consolidate different lines of work. It’s good to have a team that is able to operate as an independent unit when the need should arise. 

Also, different countries have their own regional differences in terms of public holidays, as well as unforeseeable situations when you may find an entire office from a certain location unable to work due to a natural disaster or political instabilities. 

Tasks and backlog management 

When working with both in-house and remote teams, the workload should be evenly distributed. Remember, that remote teams are not an appendix to the main office, but treat them as equals and show appreciation for their contribution to the project. 

When it comes to distributed agile development, it’s important to ensure that there are no delays with co-dependent teams in delivering on their part. The team should be realistic about the user stories they commit to in terms of dependencies and on-time delivery. Because of this, it may be advisable to reconsider committing to complex user stories that may require a lot of input and contribution from remote team members. These complex stories may be broken down into smaller and more manageable sizes. 

A self-manageable team should be able to continue working on tasks without major delays. The backlog should be created with this in mind. 

Agile activities and events for distributed teams 

In order to accommodate the work of a remote team, extra effort goes into organizing the Agile workflow and introducing tools to facilitate communication, planning and collaboration. Properly organized, these ceremonies work great for managing workload with distributed teams. 

Daily stand-ups are just a routine for co-located teams but become a crucial point of contact when you are working remotely. This is the time when team members report on their tasks in progress and communicate issues or blockers. To make the best of this time, you can also talk about other tasks that you have planned for the sprint or in your backlog. Team members should be asked some “burning” questions: 

• Do you need input? Who can assist you with that? 
• Do you have any blockers? Are you blocking someone else’s work? 
• Will you be able to pick up these tasks once done with the current work? 

Keep in mind that if you need someone else’s contribution to continue working on your tasks, the person might not be immediately available, so address these moments beforehand. 

To accommodate Agile ceremonies, remote teams may use video conferencing software and screen sharing. Of course, it helps to have an uninterrupted internet connection and good quality sound equipment.  

This works just as well for daily meetings, as for weekly sprint reviews and even retrospective meetings, with the difference being in the scope of work that you are looking back at. It may require some time to set up virtual tools, whiteboards and breakout rooms, etc. But in the long run, teams often opt to switch to using these tools for all their work and planning even if they’re co-located. It is more convenient and you don’t end up doing double the work, like when you do your planning on a wall with sticky notes only then to transfer it into a spreadsheet. 

An interesting fact is that some companies have even successfully conducted full-on PI plannings for distributed teams with remarkable results. This doesn’t go to say that in-person events are redundant. Socialization is usually a big part of PI planning as it helps establish good relations within the team and for distributed teams that are brought to the location specifically for the event. But if meeting in-person is not an option, it is possible to get it done with a virtual agile team without too many losses. 

File-sharing 
Coming back to the daily grind, distributed teams benefit from setting up a file-sharing network. Multiple people should be able to access and work on the files if necessary, so it makes all the sense to use a cloud-based storage service. 

Tools to check out: 

• MS SharePoint 
• Google Drive 
• Dropbox 

Communication 
For communicating throughout the day, teams can use instant messengers. This can be either person-to-person or group chats, conference calls, etc. With some tools like MS Teams, you can schedule calls in advance and even see the other person’s available time slots. 

Tools to check out: 

• Slack 
• Skype 
• MS Teams 

Task management 
Agile teams regularly use services to track tasks in a sprint and manage the workload on a weekly or bi-weekly basis depending on how long is the sprint. 

Tools to check out: 

• Jira 
• Trello 
• Asana 

Team workspace 
The team can create something like a wiki to be the single source of information and all updates on the project. Code documentation, although not a priority according to the Agile manifesto, for distributed teams may replace the need for in-person communication or calls and meetings to discuss the code. Another important purpose of a shared team workspace would be source code management and version control. 

Tools to check out: 

• Confluence 
• GitHub 
• AWS CodeCommit 
• Agile Bench 
• Agile Manager 

Brainstorming Ideas  
The tools for idea brainstorming and collaboration are a must for any distributed team. They serve as a whiteboard where anyone can add ideas, map different items, comment, and offer many more features that make remote collaboration more effective. There are a bunch of tools that can serve this purpose: 

• MURAL 
• Miro 
• GroupMap 
• Google Docs 

A good practice is to use a combination of tools that best suits your project’s purposes and the teams’ needs. This way you can greatly improve your output and the quality of work. For instance, having proper documentation and governance for QA and software development process in place allowed VirtualStock team to deliver new product release every two weeks. 

Working with distributed teams may pose some challenges and risks compared to traditional teams, which should be addressed to help remote team members ease into the work process and avoid unnecessary clashes due to inherent differences. 

Communication gaps come as the most commonly occurring issue for remote teams. When not working in-person, it takes effort to organize efficient communication. You’ll have to schedule a call instead of just walking by your coworker’s desk. You may get delayed replies to your emails or messages. Worst case scenario, you’ll have a time-sensitive task or an urgent question and won’t be able to contact your colleague on the spot. The more people are involved in communication, the more complicated it becomes. Efficient communication for remote teams requires diligence and time management, collaboration and at times compromises. 

Cultural differences is another challenge that may seem unlikely but good to account for when managing distributed teams. This may manifest itself in how people with different cultural backgrounds approach their tasks if they have respect for deadlines, subordination and formal or informal communication. There are nuances in different situations and it’s important to respect other cultures. However, the best practice would be to find a common ground that could be expressed in the company culture shared across locations. 

Time zones come as a big challenge for the effective organization of team communication. A difference in time may mean that your team member from the other end of the world may be getting valuable input from you on the project when they are already done for the day, while you are just up and about to start the day. If any urgent issues occur, it may be hard to get a hold of people at short notice, unlike with traditional teams when you can walk right up to your coworker’s desk. 

This can be helped by excessive planning around different time zones and finding time slots with overlapping working hours that are suitable for everyone involved. Consistency with schedules, timely communication ahead of the deadline, making sure that there is a time bumper for unforeseeable situations, clearly communicating your needs may be helpful as well. 

We have mentioned and suggested possible solutions for all the big-picture issues that may come in the way of the efficient work of your team. Here are a few more quick tips that you might find helpful for managing your distributed Agile teams: 

• Build a team that works well together. Your team should bring together people who show a high level of professionalism, who are motivated and committed to the common goal, etc. 

• Build trust and transparency. This can be obtained with proper reporting and efficient information flows. 

• Make communication as easy as possible. This means efficient time management and scheduling, finding the right tools and encouraging your team to use them. 

• Co-locate development teams with their Product Owner. As mentioned above, teams work best if they are able to be self-sufficient and function without any restraints or major dependencies. A Product Owner can play a big role in achieving this for your remote development team. 

• Get training from an Agile coach not when you’re in the bottleneck, but on the start. Training for all teams helps to understand for every member Agile practices better, his/her role within Agile process and act better as a team then. Also, the neutral view and recommendations from a third-party expert can reveal for you many insights and points to improve your team efficiency. As it was in the case when our Agile experts conducted training for Casumo’s team that helped them achieve more efficient collaboration.  

• Organize offline activities and events. If possible, find the time to bring your team together. Let them mingle and build a relationship. 

• Minimize delays and wait times. At daily stand-ups address not only your work for the day but issues that may hinder your work tomorrow and further down the week. Be aware of possible dependencies and blockers. 

Summary 

Although designed originally for close in-person cooperation, Agile gives distributed teams the means to manage their workflow and address all the shortcoming of working remotely. Distributed development best practices correlate with many Agile principles and when equipped with the right tools, remote Agile teams are empowered to accelerate development and put out top-quality software on the market as fast as co-located teams with a bonus of smart budgeting and saved costs from engaging teams from other countries. 

So don’t hesitate to step into Agile, as its benefits are obvious. Even in case, you feel struggling with implementing it, check our Agile consulting services that help to implement Agile in your team and organization considering the specifics of your project and industry. 

Benefits of having an LMS for your business

LMS creates a multifaceted learning environment that facilitates the employees in their journey from providing the learning materials to testing and evaluation of retained knowledge. A system as such can be used for a multitude of purposes in an organization: employee onboarding, personnel or customer training, compliance and security awareness training, reskilling, certification training. 

It’s an interactive online portal that recreates the learning experience with many additional perks, like 24/7 availability and the possibility to learn on the go. Moreover, an LMS may provide advanced features and functionality to enhance the learning process and help develop new skills and retain knowledge. A properly developed LMS system allows providing the learning experience akin to that of a classroom at a fraction of the cost. 

So, the main benefits of using an LMS for your organization would be as follows: 

• Time-efficiency that benefits both the employees and the company. 
• It saves the company costs in the long run. 
• The system is easy to update and scale. 
• Improves team performance and increases knowledge retention. 
• Learning is targeted and therefore more efficient, meaning that your team gets the skills that they actually need. 
• May be used both internally or offered as a service. As in case of our client, Intuition, creating an LMS helped them grow client base and increase revenue.

Must-have custom LMS features 

When developing a custom LMS, some features will be common for all systems, as there are many functionalities that are considered a must-have, so they will surely be of use for different business verticals when delivering training and courses. Let’s look at some of the must-have features that a developer should consider when creating a learning management system. 

Cross-platform accessibility 

Cross-platform accessibility allows for users to access the LMS on any device, no matter the software platform or operating system. For example, this means that the mobile version of the learning app should be available for both Android and iOS. If the LMS is web-based, you want it to be compatible with most browsers, like Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. 

Intuitive UI

Intuitive UI is a must-have as it helps the user to quickly get familiar with the functionality of the learning management system. You want the user to actually learn rather than try to figure out how to access the learning material or take a test. A UI should be simple, visual and intuitive. 

That means building a system that is easy to download on any operating system, as well as supports a stress-free startup process. In fact, if possible, users should be able to log in with one tap, whether with a one-time password (OTP) or a biometric verification system for advanced security.  Moreover, the system should be reliable and glitch-free once users are logged in. 

Admin dashboard

Admin dashboard that provides automation of basic functions where possible so that admins don’t have to spend time on mundane tasks like enrolling users into a course, making reports, any bulk actions, etc. 

Real-time insights into such areas ensure that employees truly benefit from the learning programs in place. For instance, an admin can access a user’s panel once they notice an irregular pattern in their normal learning behavior. This could help a business know whether it needs to enhance its experience so that users can resume their normal learning patterns, or even perform better.

Personalized learning roadmap

Personalized learning roadmap to track the learning process, obtained certifications, skill level. This should be individual for each student. With the help of AI technologies you can go far with personalizing the learning experience. 

Course content and catalogue management

Course content and catalogue management. Create a marketplace where the users can browse the available courses, filter to their preferences, and choose what courses they want to enroll to. Likewise, the mentor should be able to add and edit courses, manage the materials, have access to the work submitted by users for review, etc. 

Compliance with standards and specifications

Compliance with standards and specifications. These are technical standards and specifications for eLearning software (e.g., SCORM,  AICC, WCAG, xAPI (Tin-Can), IMS). They allow creating learning content that is compliant with different eLearning software products. You’ll need to comply with these, if you want to introduce outsourced learning materials into your LMS, or decide to monetize your LMS by offering your courses to other companies. 

Other standards and specifications that a custom LMS solution should comply with include: 

• General Data Protection Regulation in the EU 
• Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in the US 
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 
• The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 

Licensing and certifications

Licensing and certifications. Certification management feature in an LMS allows the users to get proper accreditation for their accomplishments. If you ever consider providing your LMS to other companies, this feature can become a strong selling point. 

Gamification

Gamification – point system, badges and prices, levels to make the learning experience more game-like and stimulating. As an element of gamification, the learner could track their progress and celebrate achievements on the way. 

Accessible for mobile devices.

Accessible for mobile devices. Mobile learning is the talk of the town with people often having to learn on the go and always having the learning materials at hand. As you sneak out minutes out of your busy work day to study, you’ll want to have the learning platform as easily accessible as possible. 

Take custom LMS 365 as an example, which allows users to deploy it in the cloud or on-premise via mobile apps for both iOS and android platforms. 

Moreover, it will help if you introduce offline capabilities to enhance the experience of the learners even if they don’t have access to a reliable internet connection. LMS 365 users can simply log into the system and browse an extensive catalog of readily available offline learning materials. 

Microlearning

Microlearning is another idea that can be implemented in a LMS for quick learning at the point of need but it may not necessarily be regarded as a must-have. 

Analytics and reporting

Analytics and reporting, tracking metrics and learner activity, how it impacts the organization.

Socializing and group activities

Socializing and group activities. This can be both formal and informal, discussion forums, mentorship programs, tools for collaborations on the platform. Another way to make the learning experience more social would be to integrate social media apps into the platform, like, for example, allow users to share their achievements and badges on their social media accounts. Instant messaging, chats, and calls are another way to make the platform more interactive. These can be used both as an element of learning and for interpersonal communication for users and mentors. 

Branding

Branding. You can create a unique platform with distinct branding, something that makes you recognizable and lets you stand out. 

Globalization

Globalization. With an LMS you can learn from anywhere and at any time. To make it even more accessible and expand globally, consider adding language localization, global payment gateways for e-commerce, etc. 

Third-party integration

Third-party integration may enhance the overall learning experience of the user. Consider creating a platform that can be integrated with other plugins, tools, or platforms (e.g., videoconference tools, SSO, API and plugins, CRM, e-commerce, calendar integration, etc.). 

LMS software development process 

Now that you know what enterprise LMS stands for and why you need one, you can proceed with designing and developing a learning management system for your company or organization. Generally, the process doesn’t drastically differ from that of any other software development. The LMS development comprises the following steps: 

• Market research is a step that cannot be overlooked if you want to create something that will be relevant to the current eLearning industry. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel or use methodologies and tools that have become obsolete. That’s why market research is important to discover what products and tools are available and what you can use to your benefit. There may already be easier ways and better solutions that you can apply to your product. Or research what is presented on the market to get even better ideas, deliver more efficient product and become the innovator in the eLearning niche. Then again, if you ever decide to roll out your LMS as a product or service that you offer to customers, you want it to be competitive. That’s why market research is so essential.  

• Assessment and estimation is a necessary preparation step before you start building anything. As an LMS can become a complex and scalable project, there are many aspects of it to account for, going beyond budget and deadlines. Proper assessment and estimation is a must. 

• Requirements gathering comes as the next essential stage for any project. It determines what next steps you’ll have to take in the development process. As you’ll be investing time and money in learning management system development, you also need to account for your budget and deadlines. Fleshing out the idea and gathering all the requirements helps with planning and setting milestones for the development team. Later on the requirements can be adjusted, but this first step is still important and can’t be skipped. 

• Choosing a tech stack based on requirements comes as the next step in the development process. Tech stack consists of front-end, back-end parts and additional technologies you might consider to integrate into your eLearning platform. Many technicalities need to be considered here, as you’ll be working with data storages, large amounts of data, and sensitive information. 

Front-end. The popular options for web development in the eLearning industry are web  frameworks, such as AngularJS, ReactJS, Laravel. 

Back-end. Speaking about the backend of your LMS platform, the best-choice solution is  cloud architecture, namely serverless, as it offers a vast range of benefits: pay-as-you-go,  easier maintainability and scalability, security at scale. It’s a proven versatile solution with  decreased TTM and improved latency and geolocation. The most popular public cloud  provider that you can choose from are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud,  Microsoft Azure and others, that may suit the main part of requirements for eLearning  software development on cloud. 
But in case that databases of cloud providers don’t suit your requirements, then you can  choose a dedicated database instance. When choosing it, it is very important to consider the  type and volume of data stored and other mandatory requirements for the system, such as  performance, security, the cost of storage, etc. There are relational, hierarchical, network,  object-oriented, graph, ER model, document and key-value databases. The choice, as you  can see, is not as simple as it seems at first glance. 

Additional technologies. As your LMS evolves, you might want to introduce more complex  features: 
– AR/VR integration introduced into your app can be the gamification element in eLearning to make the studying experience much more engaging.  
– AI personalization and ML algorithms collect and use data to improve the eLearning experience of the user and create a custom learning environment. 

All these require custom front-end and back-end infrastructure development for sure, but rewards with cutting-edge user experience. 

• Prototyping and wireframing. Next, when you’re done with choosing the tech stack and have all the requirements prepared for your eLearning platform development, it’s time to proceed with prototyping and wireframing. LMS platforms may be content heavy and provide many different functionalities which inevitably renders them complex. Wireframing helps create the screen blueprint, which means structuring and laying out all the content and functionality. And a prototype is essentially an advanced wireframe which is visual and interactive. 

Still in the initial stages of the SDLC, after the prototyping is done, you will want to create an MVP which is the very first usable example of software that you will get in the course of your project. A minimum viable product, or MVP,  has some minimum set of features that makes it something that can already be used and tested by the actual user, for whom the LMS is intended. It can show you if your idea is foolproof and if you are ready to move onto UI and full development. 

• UI/UX is immensely important when it comes to how to create an LMS website or app that’s engaging and interactive. The learning experience that you provide should capture the interest of the users and have them coming back for more. The LMS platform should be easy enough to use and provide the kind of experience that is both educational and entertaining. This is why gamification and socializing are now often considered must-have features for LMS. 

• Development is when you do all the coding and create all parts of the LMS. The development team meticulously goes through the list of features that you want your platform to have and does all the programming. 

• Testing is another important part of the SDLC. As you are working on development, adding new features and functionality, you need to make sure that it’s working in accordance to requirements. You want your product to be bug free and do what it’s supposed to be doing. Apart from that, you also need to test all the content and visuals, compliances, compatibility. Then, whenever you make a change or add something new, you need to run regression testing to see that you haven’t broken anything. So make sure to implement QA practices and expect it to be an integral part of your process right up until the launch of the LMS. 

• Deployment is making your software system or application available to the user. When it’s running mostly bug-free and has all the necessary functionality to provide the proper experience to the user. After you have launched your product, deployment can happen as often as every two weeks, when you roll out new features, bug-fixes, or improvements. 

• Maintenance and updates follow the project for as long as its viable and marketable. This is not just about fixing whatever gets broken. As the time passes, there will be new advancements in technologies that you may want to implement for your LMS. It’s not likely that a product like an LMS can be done and over with, which stems from the specifics of the eLearning industry. Also, at some point, you may want to scale the project and so it will need adjustments and revamping. In this regard, you may want to opt for managed services for your product where your development service provider carries on maintaining your LMS for as long as you need it.  

As an LMS is developed in an Agile SDLC, this tends to be an iterative process and loops on the development-testing-deployment steps whenever a new functionality or feature is introduced. This allows the development team to make sure that the system works in its entirety and provides the proper functionality to the admin and users. 

Implementing Agile practices when developing an LMS, such as continuous improvement of the product and frequent releases, is crucial to the integrity of the eLearning system as it cannot be built start-to-finish in one go. That would go against what learning stands for in its essence. An LMS evolves with time and needs to keep up with the outside world, reflecting its changes and new findings. Otherwise, it would become obsolete in a couple of months if not weeks. As the world is overloaded with information and knowledge is the force that drives progress, if anything, a product that serves to provide this knowledge should always strive to remain relevant and provide proper information and resources. 

The cost of building an LMS 

The budget you may require to build a custom LMS varies depending on the scope of features that you want to have, what tools you choose, are you intending to scale it up in the future, etc. Generally, when discussing costs of development, you need to ask yourself a few questions. 

• Is it going to be local or cloud? 
• What is the expected load on the system? 
• What is the scope of work? 
• Will you need to scale up in the foreseeable future? 
• Will it require continuous maintenance? 

Depending on these aspects and more, the cost of building a custom learning management system may start at $5000 for an MVP and go as high as $50,000. Then you may also need to pay extra for any additional features that you want to add later on, and of course there’s the fee for maintenance and continuous support. 

With online learning trending it has all the potential to become an integral part of our life. Symphony Solutions is specializing in custom software development and has experience in building eLearning platforms for our clients. 

Behavioural 

Any Scrum Master’s job largely revolves around communication and resolving issues that come up in the working process. In this regard, it helps to have a strong set of personal traits and values that help the Scrum Master become the beacon of reason in the team. The trusty leader that looks out for the team’s best interest. Someone who is trusted and can be relied on. Behavioural competencies mostly result from your personality – a combination of nature and nurture. However, you can strengthen these skills with self-reflection and personal development. 

• Readiness to scale on the country level.
• Remote diagnosis functionality, which sufficiently cut costs for the end user and meant that the company could process more tests.

Summary 

An Agile team is sleek and streamlined in structure, with every member of the team like a gear that fits right inside the mechanism – nothing more and nothing less. This ensures that the job is being done in accordance to all requirements and delivered on time. At the same time, team resources are used wisely and not wasted, which translates to time, effort and skill. Knowledge sharing is greatly encouraged, thus, creating a dynamic environment of constant growth and support where each team member gets to bring something to the table and grow in their own expertise.  

If you’ve decided to implement Agile for your software development or even a non-tech team but are hesitant where to start, feel free to reach out to us. Our experts with help you with Agile consulting and coaching or set up an Agile training session to establish the process best suitable for your team. 

What are the typical differences between ‘White Label, Turn-Key, Hybrid or Custom Sportsbetting Platform’?

The table below serves to highlight a few key differences between typical white label, hybrid, turn-key sports betting platform development with that of a fully customized approach to sportsbook development. It is important to note that the product and services offerings of platform providers vary a great deal and there are different features and attributes available on the market. So, with that caveat, here are some of the most common differences. 

What is a White Label Sports Betting Solution? 

A white label sports betting solution is a fully supported product that can be rebranded for your business’s use under the provider’s license. Apart from branding, it offers ease of entry with lower initial investment and quicker market access, but with less control over the product and potential dependency on the provider’s technology and updates. 

What is a Turn-Key Sports Betting Solution?

A Turn-Key Sports Betting Solution is a flexible and comprehensive product for which you get your own license to use. This is opposed to a white label solution where you use the provider’s license. The product can be customized further although with limitations on changes to the front end based on the geographical location. Turn-Key solutions are suited for operators who require a unique brand identity but still need foundational software infrastructure.

What is a Hybrid Sportsbook Solution?

A Hybrid Sportsbook Solution allows a high degree of customisation on the front end with your business also awarded full ownership of the product through its own license. Limitations are only on features run by the provider, otherwise things such as customer facing channels and native apps can all be rebranded for the businesses.

What is a Custom Sportsbook Platform?

A Custom Sportsbook Platform is a fully customizable product with your business having its own licensing and responsible for its own regulatory reporting. You can decide which integrations to make with your sportsbook solution to personalize your platform. Custom platforms are best for established operators aiming for complete control and differentiation in the market, offering a unique user experience tailored to their audience. 

White Label vs Turnkey vs Hybrid vs Custom Sports Betting Platform 

Consider Geographical Areas

Almost all ‘white label’ or off-the-shelf offerings will require significant amounts of software customization and configuration before launch. Let’s take the African market as an example. 

At Symphony Solutions, we are currently working with a large operator that is keen to offer an excellent online experience for its customers. They operate in a large number of African countries. Each with its own unique culture, its own set of rules, regulations, taxes, languages and preferences for content. 

The vast majority of customers in Africa will be accessing your sportsbook and casino via a low-end Android mobile phone using a much slower network than that of your European customers. 2G and 3G is common. 5G is but a distant dream. 

Yomi Kazeem of Quartz Africa reported that by 2025 it is projected that 5G usage will only account for 3% of the total mobile connections in Africa and that 58% will still be using 3G in 2025. 

At Symphony Solutions, we recognize the impact that this has on the online experience and are working closely with our client to ensure that the mobile experience for their African customers is optimized for these slower mobile networks. 

User Experience & Content Strategy

Speed and efficiency alone will not ensure that your customers are delighted. The content needs to be relevant; the user experience touchpoints need to deliver on the needs and expectations of the audience. Having to swipe and scroll through sports and games that are of no interest to find the ones you want will not create a memorable experience. Making sure your African customers can place accumulator bets easily is important as this is a very popular bet type in the region. Having a researched and clearly articulated content strategy is important.  Do this for each country you plan to launch in and ensure that your marketing department is closely engaged in the planning and delivery and not just the pre-launch activities. 

The benefits of creating a flexible and intuitive user interface and serving and manage content via an efficient and easy-to-use content management system are not to be underestimated. Our teams have been designing and developing content management systems for many years from nimble open-source systems suitable for smaller businesses right the way through to large enterprise-level content management systems designed to address the specific multiple or ‘omnichannel’ needs of the iGaming sector. 

In order to best address the diverse needs of a continent as vast as Africa, we leverage our experience in producing bespoke solutions. We work with new operators and with existing operators to help them reimagine their products to create new increased levels of value. Typically, this means customizing what was once a turn-key or a white label solution in order to provide the experience their customers expect. In short, we acknowledge that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work well in iGaming and that providing an innovative and enjoyable customer experience is key. 

Finally, do ensure that you capture feedback from your customers, use insights to drive product development, and be sure you are aware of cutting igaming industry trends.

Strategies for Success in Sports Betting 

To succeed in the competitive sports betting market, it’s crucial to adopt effective strategies that cater to your target audience and leverage technological advancements. Here are key strategies: 

• User-Centric Design: Develop a platform that offers a personalized and engaging betting experience, with features like live betting, in-play statistics, and easy navigation. 

• Agile Operations: Stay flexible to adapt to changes in market trends, customer preferences, and regulations. 

• Data-Driven Decisions: Utilize analytics to understand user behavior, tailor marketing strategies, and refine betting options. 

• Mobile Optimization: Ensure that your platform is optimized for mobile devices, providing a seamless experience for users on-the-go. 

• Customer Support Excellence: Offer comprehensive customer support through multiple channels like live chat, email, and phone support. 

• Effective Marketing: Develop marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience, utilizing social media, email marketing, and other digital channels. 

• Regulatory Compliance: Regularly update your platform to comply with changing laws and regulations, maintaining a good standing in all operational jurisdictions. 

Conclusion 

Developing a sports betting platform demands a strategic blend of technological acumen, market insight, and user-focused design. As the landscape of sports betting evolves, operators must navigate complex decisions around software selection, platform creation, and strategic implementation to ensure they offer an experience that resonates with their audience and stands out in a competitive marketplace. Embracing innovation, prioritizing user experience, and adhering to regulatory standards are essential for success in this dynamic industry. 

Contact us if you would like to find out more about our customer-focused bespoke iGaming Solutions or ready-made sportsbook platform.

Agile is about small iterative rounds of change. Yet integral approach is as important as ever

Agile transformation is the change process. The process, not a one-time event. If you wish to achieve profound progress in Agile adoption in your teams, don’t do training first. Develop a broader roadmap. 

Though Agile is about short iterative series of changes, these have to happen within a defined streamline.  

For us in LACE transformation team, the approach that we use with our clients and that has proven to work the best – is the Agile Transformation roadmap, described below. 

This roadmap has served us and our numerous partners well in our journeys to Agile transformation. This said, below you will see that application of this roadmap may vary depending on the client’s needs, business operating reality, internal practices and compliance requirements, and last but hugely important – on our clients’ organizational culture. 

Clear problem definition saves tons of money, and sets up a vision of success

We always recommend our clients to start with assessment of their organizational readiness for Agile transformation. Beginning with the end on mind, that is what a good assessment helps us achieve. 

On the stage of assessment, we define what are the key impediments of Agile transformation in a given organization, both known to company leadership and the hidden ones. We also map the low-hanging fruit that may be utilized as first wins in the transformation journey. 

What exactly do we research on assessment stage?

Our typical list of questions that we ask cover the areas below.  

When we conduct discovery phase with the client, together we define how deep the investigation should go in each of the chapters below. Our usual assessment tools are interviews, questionnaires and focus groups.  

Depending on the client and on their particular change agenda, we may choose to go as deep as ‘anthropological studies’ with the teams, where we participate to team meetings across the business that is about to undergo Agile transformation.  

We collect the insights below not from the words of executives and team leads, but rather from our real-life observations on how teams create added value and achieve on goals.  

We know we have done a good job in assessment, when we understand how Agile practices may be applied to the work of the concrete business that we are now helping transform. 

Surprisingly enough, or maybe not so surprisingly any longer, leaders only cannot provide the most crucial insight that LACE team needs during Assessment stage. So our deep and sincere call to all professionals developing the Agile transformation roadmap – don’t stop on executives’ level! Leaders know a lot, they decide on success of Transformation efforts.  

Yet the success itself is defined by Agile transformation adopters that live outside the board rooms. Knowing their pain points, motivations, hopes and struggles – this is the insight that will define your Agile transformation success. 

Setting the common ground by proper education of involved stakeholders

Agile is such a buzzword in the modern world. It is being used so frequently that everyone is already having their own interpretation of Agile. The very common risk that we in LACE transformation team have faced regularly, is different stakeholders having different common grounds and meanings when talking about principles of Agile transformation. That is why we recommend to train all the stakeholders and to set the common grounds for the change that we want to do. 

LACE works by SAFe, an Agile methodology that has been the first to adopt a well-rounded approach to stakeholders’ education.  

We not only provide classic Agile training to Scrum masters and Product owners. In our training portfolio, we have trainings for teams that are shifting to Agile, as well as to Agile leaders.  

The latter education of leaders proves to be immensely important. More often than not Agile Leadership is the bottleneck in an organization wishing to undergo Agile Transformation. As usually the urge and energy to go Agile, comes from a particular business unit, some area of organization that is usually on frontiers of the VUCA world. In almost every organization we see business divisions that do not follow or interpret differently the Agile philosophy. When not addressed timely, misalignment in leadership team results in a bunch of roadblocks later in Agile Transformation journey.  

In LACE, our standard Agile training portfolio consists of the following trainings below. Depending on our clients’ needs, we either deliver training ‘from the shelf’ (yet less frequently these days) or tailor our programs to the clients’ needs. We do practice collabs with the third-party training providers, as well as with internal L&D departments on the client’s side, in order to set up training programs that address exact needs for Agile transformation. 

As to the format, we offer both online and on-premise training. Below you may find more detailed information on learning options available.

ON-LINE

1. Agile Basics, duration 4 hours.
2. Scrum Basics, duration 1 day.
3. Organization Agility training for Business), duration 6 hours.
4. Agile Product Management, duration 5 hours.
5.  Organizational Agility Course, duration 2 days.

OFF-LINE

1. Scrum Basics.
2. Agile Fundamentals (with certification). 
3. Leading SAFe (with certification).
4. SAFe for Teams (with certification).
5. SAFe PO/PM (with certification).
6. SAFe SM (with certification).
7. Management 3.0 (with certification).

Remember, the training is important, as it sets the common ground for further change. If there is one most valuable step to consider in training Agile – consider this. Always make sure that all of your key stakeholders are properly trained and equipped with knowledge for the Agile Transformation journey. 

Knowledge provides the mental capacity to do change, tools empower the actual change

The essential part of Agile transformation is for LACE team to audit and adjust tools that are available in the organization, to serve the needs of the new Agile teams. The very first thing that we do, is we explore the tools that are already adopted and being successfully used by our client’s organization. 

Agile can be practiced even with the whiteboards, or so the prophets say. In our experience, it is frequently possible to utilize the client’s existing toolset, in order to get Agile transformation going. In case it is not possible, we do help the client to properly select and set up the tooling that will serve their Agile transformation needs. 

Tooling is the driver of successful Agile transformation. There is a ‘yet’ here, though. Transformation results are to serve the common business goals, which are usually being planned, tracked and achieved with the set tools. Whenever possible, try to utilize the existing tools for Agile Transformation goals. Don’t run for funky new tools just for the sake of novelty, this is our advice here. 

When the elements are set, it is time to get the process going

We think that the entire meaning of Agile transformation boils down to how effectively the Agile processes are being adopted by the teams that are in the transformation process. The results of previous steps – assessment, training, tooling, can be seen on this stage very vividly. 

On the process setting stage, LACE team takes care of setting up the Agile rituals, Agile meetings like PI Planning even for distributed team, on making sure that teams practice what they have learned and the tools are being used in the way they have been intended to.  

In our experience, for organizations that undergo fundamental Agile transformation, Retrospective is the hardest process innovation that they go through. The teams that have never practiced Agile before, need the most careful nurture from LACE team, on the way they learn from own experiences.  

Though not always the case, yet with majority of our clients it has been necessary to set up team space and time to reflect on past performance; it took most daring efforts to help the team start using the time and space to reflect on their performance; and most of the struggles and proud achievements we have had with the empowered teams that grasped the meaning of iterative improvement and the true ‘by the book’ value that Agile brings. 

In essence, process setting provides sense to all previous steps in Agile transformation, making sure that the individual puzzles of the Agile journey are put together and start functioning. 

Culture eats everything for breakfast

The topic of organizational culture deserves a whole separate post by itself. In the experiences with our clients, LACE team has always paid very deliberate attention to the way in which things are being done in organization. As the strongest wind that propels the success of Agile Transformation efforts, as well as most difficult impediments – they all come from the hidden and unwritten norms that exist in the company. 

To tell the truth, there has yet never been a client for which we did not do change initiative. Yet for some of our clients we did have to change the scope, or amount of educational and communicational activities, in order to get change going.  

The culture thing is the most difficult to understand for an external consultant. So it has always been one of the most deeply researched questions on the assessment stage of Agile transformation. 

Remember, culture eats the strategy for breakfast. Or frankly, it eats everything for breakfast. Make sure that you navigate well in organizational culture of your client, as this may be the question of life or death for your Agile transformation initiatives. 

Blossom comes from a good seed, properly planted, and deliberately cared for

We have started this article with one fundamental truth that has proven so many times for us – transformation is the process, not a one-time event. In order for Agile transformation to work, it needs to be deliberately, attentively and resourcefully nurtured.  

Having set up all the processes well brings a great level of enthusiasm to the teams. This in return brings early wins and fuels more adopters of Agile transformation. Yet we have noticed that with time the energy level drops, and there is a risk (at least for some categories of Agile adopters) to come back to the old ways of doing things. 

That is why the crucial step for Agile transformation happens actually after the Agile transformation. We in LACE call it Agile coaching. This is a very individualized process of our consultants supporting the concrete use cases and challenges that concrete teams face when gaining their first experience with Agile.  

We know, no systematization on this stage. Our coaches come back to every team individually, empathize with their particular struggles and support their unique successes, with the aim to obtain a side-view on how the teams may sustain the Agile transformation for achieving results on their level.  

As LACE team has experienced this multiple times with our clients: when Agile becomes the way we do things over here, when Agile is not the way we do things, when it is a philosophy of ours – the change has been achieved. And the organization of yours is equipped with Agile ways of creating the value, which is the competitive advantage in the VUCA world we live. 

To conclude, big changes are difficult, costly and very consuming exercise. In the modern world, changes are inevitable. Agile Transformation provides a toolkit to your business that may help you to have change not as a grand costly project, rather to have change as an on-going iterative evolutionary process. This, in essence, may help your firm to stay in line with the market changes and to deliver the best possible product or service to your clients in every given point of time. 

The cycle of Service Design in a project

Service design, Lean and Agile are similar in nature but these are all different approaches that aim to accomplish something different in a project. However, having them combined, we can achieve great benefits. 

Service design comes at the start of each cycle of the project. We begin by exploring the problem, generate insights and ideas. When that part is finalized, we go into prototype and start the Lean phase, and after that comes the Agile part. When the cycle starts over, we find ourselves back to service design where we review what is going on and at what stage our product is in its lifecycle. Thus, the process continues until we have a finished product. 

Lean Agile applied to Service Design

Agile implementation introduces a positively new approach to delivering the product. Agile teams work in sprints and divide the workload into smaller chunks. This makes it easier to efficiently track the work being done, consolidate efforts, cooperate, and manage dependencies. But most importantly, it allows the team to create a ready–to–test product that can be delivered in small increments. 

It’s important to distinguish what perks come out of applying service design in Agile environments. As mentioned above, agile teams thrive when they have the flexibility to manage the project with all its dependencies and keep in close collaboration both within the team and with the client. 

Lean agile is even more so beneficial when we start scaling up. Scaled agile means aligning several teams that are working on one product but probably on different features. The teams have different stakeholders and product owners but they all share a common goal. 

Summing up, we can say that, as an agile team, you can find many benefits in applying Service Design and Lean Agile to your work process. Symphony Solutions LACE office provides interactive webinars on Lean Agile Service Design, the next online event coming up on December 10, where our experts will first-hand talk about the practical benefits of adopting the approach, share service design best practices and case studies, and answer your questions if any may arise. Also, Symphony Solutions offers Service Design consulting services for when you are ready to take your business to the next level with expert guidance and support.

Agile mindset, also referred to as a “growth mindset”, is a system of beliefs applied to a working environment that appeals to the notion of continuous change with the main focus on delivering value to the customer. In contrast to a “fixed mindset”, when you are set in your ways as an expert and do what you know to give predetermined results, agile is all about embracing the change and facing whatever challenges arise on every stage of the project lifecycle. 

Incorporating agile thinking into your core beliefs opens you up to the idea that you will always continue to learn and grow as a professional. It encourages you to discover alternative and better ways to deliver results, eradicates the stigma of making mistakes and introduces you to the option of learning from your failures instead. 

Why does it matter to be “agile”?

It’s all about flexibility, creativity and commitment. 

To put things into perspective, imagine the following scenario. You start off with a new client, determine requirements for the project, agree on a budget and set a deadline. All is well, until you meet again when the time of the delivery comes and suddenly all sorts of questions start popping out seemingly out of nowhere. 

The client wasn’t entirely definite in their wants for the project when you first started out. Now, seeing the delivered product, they realise that they want something different. 

Upon delivery, turns out that the client wanted more or different functionality, all of which tugs on the budget limits. 

The client is no longer enthusiastic about this project, but wouldn’t mind working on something else. 

The list can go on, but the point is that there was a big leap from the start till the end of the project, and the client couldn’t control what was going on in between and come up with better ideas on the go. 

As a result, the client isn’t happy, you have to start over, and the team is demotivated, because all of their hard work went to waste. These examples uncover the pitfalls in project management, team alignment, client communication, and so on. 

In short, you want to be agile because it makes you: 

• Flexible to change 
• Resistant to uncertainty and/or failure 
• Deliver value to the client early and consistently 
• Motivated and responsible to get the job done 
• Self-organized and mindful of your input in the project 

To sum up, according to PwC research Agile projects are 28% more successful than traditional projects which is a substantial difference. 

Key Agile values and principles

Whether you’re just considering a switch to agile ways of working, or you’ve been in the game for a while, you’ll want to incorporate some changes into your day-to-day work life. 

A group of software development practitioners took it upon themselves to define the agile values and principles in the Agile Manifesto. These rules, however, are not supposed to be perceived as set in stone. They can be used as guidance for those who are still finding their way to agility. 

The four values of Agile Manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. 
• Working software over comprehensive documentation. 
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan. 

These values lay out the foundation of an agile working environment and address the way you interact with your team or customers, how you go about accomplishing what needs to be done and set priorities for the project. Perceive them as the stepping stones on your company’s way to business agility. These are the essence of what it means to be agile, setting the precedent for your further Agile Transformation. 

Furthermore, the Agile Manifesto outlines the twelve principles as a fundamental guidance to teams in pursuit of business agility. 

The 12 Agile principles to follow:

1. Early and continuous delivery of value to satisfy the customer.  
2. Responsiveness to changing requirements on all stages of development. 3.
3. Frequent delivery of working product. Strive to deliver results in increments in a short timeframe of a few weeks to months. 
4. Daily collaboration of business and developers. 
5. Motivation and individual responsibility. Create the environment, support, trust people to get the job done. 
6. Face-to-face communication. 
7. Working software is the measure for progress. 
8. Sustainability. 
9. Technical excellence and good design. 
10. Simplicity. 
11. Self-organizing teams. 
12. Reflecting on the work done and adjusting accordingly. 

A team that adheres to these principles, is focused on a common goal to satisfy the customer and builds a relationship with both clients and within the team, based on mutual respect and active cooperation. 

Seeking for the optimal way to deliver results, the team is constantly improving and growing with time and experience. The process is organic because you improve in small increments. The team is encouraged to learn from their mistakes. As a team member, you learn to be accountable to yourself and the team. 

And, of course, the main focus is to deliver value, therefore when the need arises, the team needs to be flexible to change and focus on the main priority. 

Agile vs. Waterfall

Agile is often places as opposite to the traditional Waterfall methodology. The waterfall model is linear and predominantly deadline-based, which means that the project is broken down and executed in a sequence of consecutive steps which are all performed one after the other. The client can see the working product only at the end of the entire cycle, as opposed to agile, where usable output is delivered upon every sprint and making changes as the project progresses is allowed and encouraged. 

However, it’s important to recognize when agile is appropriate in any given situation. Agile works great for startups where it’s important to keep a fast pace and remain flexible to changes as the team’s main objective is to create a minimal viable product (MVP). On the contrary, big companies that operate using the waterfall method, may not be as quick to accept agile as the main methodology on scale. However, it may show positive results when introduced in small teams or individually. 

Agile may be adopted on an individual, team or organizational level. If you are not sure if this approach is suitable for your company, try starting small with one team and test how they are able to adapt their work to the agile principles. This may be the case for big companies, which traditionally operate in the Waterfall methodology. 

Finally, to assure that Agile should be continuously implemented in the team regardless of size or type, look over the statistics according to the Standish Group Chaos Study: 

Benefits of adopting an agile mindset for your organization

The many benefits of lean agile make it a desirable model of working that goes beyond software development – starting from agile modeling which precurses effective development, to agile management that is applied to management processes and project management in particular, and even agile learning that puts into use agile concepts of iterative delivery for learning. 

• Fast delivery. An agile team works quickly, responds to customer needs faster, and is generally proactive and motivated. As a case study, read about how Agile implementation helped Ladbrokes Coral to increase the product delivery to market. 

• Reduced risk and better decision-making. The team works in sprints, evaluating and responding to feedback at each point. This allows for less risk, quick and democratic decision making. 

• Transparency and visibility. Improved tracking and visibility of the project. 

• Continuous improvement. An agile team is ever-changing and growing its experience over time. Learning from mistakes is greatly encouraged. 

• It’s all about adding value. The main focus of this mindset is to deliver value to the customer. 

• Collaborative work. In Agile, team works towards a common goal. Communication is very important both within the team and with the customer. 

• Cost-effective. The methodology allows to reduce the cost of change that is implemented early on in the project and not when the work is almost or completely done. As result, it saves a lot of expenses for the business. Moreover, Agile approach in the organization increases its revenue, as the team is more efficient and the product has higher quality. Additionally, read the case of the assessment and Agile implementation for BleXr and how it helped them to achieve double-digit revenue growth.

How to develop an agile mindset on personal and team levels?

Are you now considering making a change in your work environment and benefit from introducing some agile concepts into your daily work and project management? If so, here are some tips to get you started: 

1. Analyze where you are standing and find opportunities to introduce the agile approach where possible. Let go of old ideas and concepts that aren’t working or could be replaced with more efficient ways.
2. Accept change and adapt quickly. Consider possible consequences and act accordingly.
3. Reflect on your experience to gain insight.
4. See how you can make agile a part of your company culture.
5. Remember that customer comes first! Stay in touch with them and be responsive to their needs.
6. Make transparent reporting a priority. Encourage your team to take responsibility, admit to their struggles and shortcomings and see it as a learning opportunity. Let the team see their progress over time.
7. Define team milestones and comprehensive Agile transformation plan.
8. Build a highly collaborative relationship within the team. An agile team is eager to share knowledge and help other team members be fully equipped to deal with problems and tasks.
9. Welcome diversity of thought and perspective. Create cross-functional teams where each member of the team adds unique value to the project.
10. Continually deliver usable output – the product should deliver value from the onset.
11. And don’t forget to have fun! Effective communication outside of work boosts motivation and makes a tight-knit team that works well together. 

To conclude

Over the last decade we are observing a great uprise of a new philosophy of the workplace which is designed to make the team maximize the value that they bring to the customer, as the central figure of business. As the marketplace changes, so do the key players. Agile mindset is what can help the team continuously improve and be responsive to the needs of the customer.  

If you consider switching your business to Agile, but don’t know where to start, reach out to us. We have years of domain experience with different company types and can provide you with Agile consulting service and a plan to implement Agile smoothly for your business purposes. 

There are these tipping points in our lives that push us to the edge, roller coast us to dare things we couldn’t have dreamt of, and drive us to leave our comfort zone. These are very uncomfortable moments. These are incredible moments. They open the door for deep self-exploration, for setting the new limits to our possibilities.   

About 8 months ago, such a tipping point moment happened in my career. I am an Agile coach with a long history of transformational projects for clients all over Europe. Being the Vice President of Agile Transformation in Symphony Solutions, I have always been brave to try things out and known to work dedicatedly for the goals of company’s clients, driving the value of an Agile mindset to address their business challenges. My career was bumpy at times, yet always steadily progressing, logical, and highly fulfilling.    

As I look back at that moment, I see myself sitting on a leather sofa of the meeting room, discussing forthcoming changes in Symphony structure of the leadership team. And then this moment happens. I am offered the role of Chief Operating Officer at Symphony Solutions, the company I’ve been working for many years, the company I have helped grow, alongside other people who are my friends not simply work colleagues. My first thought: “If I take it, my family is going to see me even less, with all the travels and personal time sacrifices that it takes to be a COO”. But what I actually say is: “But I am a woman…” It seems this reply has been anticipated, as Theo Schnitfink, the founder and visionary of Symphony Solutions, replies that having a woman that leads the organization – is a great asset of an organization. The respect of gender differences, and appreciation of diverse viewpoints that Symphony Solutions practices, have always been our competitive advantage. And something I couldn’t agree more with. As the thing that I value so deeply about Symphony – is the opportunity to be myself, which I have experienced throughout all my career with the company. Gender stereotypes should never impede growth.    

My second thought is how much I need to learn, as I want to do the role right. I suggest that I first enroll in an MBA program. Again, this answer seems to have been expected. Instead, I am offered a mentorship with the CEO of a major Tech Company in the USA. And so I decide to give it a try.   

From that moment, my entirely new journey starts. I spend hours and hours with my mentor. I bring up lists of questions to discuss. Even more questions arise during our sessions. The time spent with my mentor: a pragmatic, straightforward, seasoned leader that has experienced growth and shrinking, mergers & acquisitions, and transformations – is my personal MBA that is an invaluably important life experience. Being a C-Suite member himself, he has always found time for me, he has been fully present and dedicated to my questions and dilemmas. He was fully invested in the mentorship we have had. And I am deeply grateful to him for the time, energy, and wisdom that he has shared while helping me develop for the responsibility I was about to take.    

Interestingly enough, my prior experience as an Agile Transformation consultant helps a lot in the preparation for a new role. A major chunk of questions that we discuss with my mentor, is how to respond quickly to the needs of clients, customers, and the markets, by listening to the voices of employees, partners, and external stakeholders. With time, my long list of questions that I bring to the mentoring sessions dries out. I have a plan. I feel ready to step into this new stage of my career journey…   

I took over the COO role at Symphony Solutions on February 25th, 2020.    

And then, only after 2 weeks of me stepping into the new role, the Covid-19 crisis burst out. Suddenly, all plans, preparations, and expectations turned upside down. An entirely new reality emerged, for which no one has been quite prepared. When I glance back at it now, this looks ironical enough, as I have actually found myself in the shoes of a leader that has to walk the talk in living an Agile approach for driving the organization forward. For years I have consulted companies to apply Agile methods in times of change. 8 months ago I became the one to do this, for Symphony Solutions.  

We had the tough times and went through the challenges that stretch the most mature leadership teams. With our biggest clients cancelling and delaying the projects, with the need for optimization of support teams, with rounds of brainstorming for cost management measures, solidarity cut discussions, and whatnot. That period has probably been the most challenging time in the life of the company and my personal career journey.   

I remember one evening before a major painful decision that we had to take, and how it made me feel that night. The decision was going to impact negatively lives of many people. I was the one to make the decision, and bear responsibility for it. I was the one to listen to the stories of broken careers caused by that decision. Even now, the wave of empathy rises when I think of my colleagues impacted. It was the time of enormous stretch. And I still remember the words of my mentor, “Doesn’t matter what option you will choose, be ready to be hated right now. As a leader, you do impact the destiny of many people. In the situation that we are in now, your impact is breaking people’s well-being and disrupts their stable life. Accept it.  

While doing so, I may say that we took care of every story we have heard. We brought on the table not simply Symphony operational struggles, but the struggles of the people who were impacted by our decisions. At that time, I had to consider the personal backgrounds, life stories, family situations of those colleagues that dedicatedly worked with us for years. Many of these stories impacted the way we made decisions about optimization measures. And this is yet another leadership lesson that I have learned from this period. These struggles that we have had, they stay invisible. Most of the painful fights for balancing the interests of people and business are known only to a very narrow group of the leadership team. 

Now when we through with the crisis, and when things have returned to the growth track, I can look back and reflect on how we did it. We have definitely proof-tested on ourselves the Agile Transformation approaches, for which Symphony Solutions is known on the market. We practice what we preach, as Agile has been the strategic choice for Symphony Solutions for years already. The consistent application of Agile has paid us off. It helped us make mistakes, learn, and adapt fast. It helped us see the opportunities in limitations. Among few examples to mention, we transformed our experience of geographically dispersed teamwork into a new remote business model; we used the opportunity of work from home to re-evaluate employee journey and to structure our processes. We go forward with new hopes, aspirations, and plans. We go forward with formidable baggage of experience.    

I personally go forward with huge gratitude to those many people who have constructively challenged, helped listen to the crucial voices from the field, from employees, clients, and most important for leadership team; as well as to people who have joined collaboratively to drive the changes in Symphony Solutions that we have lived through.    

And one last insight that I have encountered on the way. Interestingly enough, I now spend more time with my family than ever, with all the flight bans and work from home modes.  

Anywhere Operations 

We launched our own Symphony Anywhere Operation and within six weeks has hired our first staff member under the new remote operating model. I myself moved from Barcelona to Gran Canaria on the 17th of September; I was keen to avoid being in a large city and having to endure a second wave of Covid related restrictions, the ones that indeed we can now see being implemented across mainland Spain. 

I have spoken to numerous iGaming companies; most have accepted work from home through until at least Q1 of next year remote working and ‘anywhere operations’ will be the norm. I strongly believe that many companies will not return to previous ways of working at all. Social distancing bubbles are being implemented across Europe. Some companies are considering a ‘bubble shift’ system with the workforce being split into cross-functional bubbles that come together in the office on certain days, with the majority of time being spent working from home. I suspect this will continue well into next year. 

Remote operations have become one of the gaming market trends too. Anywhere Operations drive many technology changes and open up value add experiences across the area of collaboration, secure remote access, cloud infrastructure, automation, and the online experience required to support an iGaming remote operation.  

Investments in these areas are already taking place and will continue to be more highly prioritized than BC (Before Covid). 

At Symphony our teams are in constant discussion with our customers, helping them to add value in response to the shift to Anywhere Operations. 

AI Engineering As One of The Main iGaming Tech Trends 

A September 2020 report on a survey by Gartner showed that growth – namely customer experience, retention, and revenue growth – along with cost optimization were the top focus areas for current AI initiatives. 

For most operators, AI has proven hard to scale internally. Finding vendors that provide AI-driven solutions that can significantly improve the customer experience, resulting in an uplift in engagement and retention metrics has been challenging. Many suppliers do not have solutions that address the specific needs of the iGaming industry. Start–ups formed having identified these gaps and have been thriving, with a rapidly growing order book.   

Many operators have struggled with internal buy in to scale their AI capabilities and feel there is a lack of AI talent, and that they are blocked by their inability to find so-called ‘unicorns’. 

Fortunately for us, we have a depth of talent across AI business and IT skills and can bring the combination of skilled people together, taking your AI initiatives through concept development to launching and the implementation of AI operationally. Moreover, our engineering team has the expertise of the successful development of AI personalization solution for gaming business. So, our teams can educate and work with you to overcome the challenges around privacy and security concerns and the integration of AI into your existing infrastructure.  

Distributed Cloud For iGaming Products 

The distributed cloud approach is an important change in how networks are planned and implemented. At a high-level, a distributed cloud refers to the distribution of cloud services to different geographical locations as opposed to a more common centralized cloud model in which services are centralized in one location. 

In the distributed cloud model, system workloads can be shifted between a central cloud, regional, and even an ‘edge cloud’. In addition, workloads can also be distributed between both private and public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft’s Azure Products. 

The benefits for iGaming operators of a distributed cloud model are that it can reduce latency, network congestion and minimize data loss while improving product quality user experience and increase customers base as in the case of cloud-based sportbook app for Ladbrokes Coral we developed. This is important to those with mobile users in rapidly developing gambling areas such as Africa and Latin America where latency is a common issue. 

Special care and attention should be paid to ensure applications reside in the best location and where and how they are processed.  

Symphony Solutions is a premier Amazon Web Services Partner; our cloud services teams are actively helping our customers ensure they make the right choices. 

Business Agility As iGaming Business Trends 

If there is a silver lining to the current pandemic, it is that the world is being put to the test. The result of which is that governments, companies, and people are innovating to prepare and grow despite the economic and market conditions we are faced with and that we will be faced with for the next few years. 

Business Agility has been much talked about – it is nothing new. However, as is the case with other trends mentioned in this article, Covid is driving the focus and rate of change at a far quicker rate than would have been predicted BC (before Covid). 

Business Agility is not something to be restricted to IT departments.  It requires that everyone needed in the provision of value to the end customer is involved. Business and technology, legal, marketing, human resources, finance, support, compliance, security, operations, product, and IT need to use proven Lean and Agile practices. That results in the rapid delivery of high-quality products and services that delight their users and are proven by our client’s success story about Agile implementation in the operations. Those who do it faster than their competition – win. 

Closing Summary & Future Gaming Technology Predictions 

iGaming operators will need to ensure they focus on not just one of the gaming industry trends mentioned above, but also on choosing the best platform fit for their igaming project firstly. Those that succeed will need to focus and act on a combination of the points mentioned above. Resiliency will be central to the ‘new normal’. 

We are living through a turbulent time. We will no doubt look back on this time with sadness and deep regret about the loss of life and the profound economic hardship endured. In addition, we will look back on this period as a time that propelled us to new ways of working, to embrace new technologies. A time that gave rise to entirely new operating models that became the ‘norm’ in the future.   

The leaders of iGaming companies, their CIO’s and CTO’s will need to look for opportunities to design next-generation digital platforms. Ones that will modernize and rationalize applications and infrastructure whilst implementing extremely flexible capabilities to design and deliver new products, better services, and experiences to both their own employees and their iGaming customers. This will be Covid’s IT legacy. If you want us to help you create that legacy, please look over our igaming platform development services and get in touch. Together we deliver cutting-edge products to the market. 

We remained the same culture, same focus – although now in an unexpectedly all-remote mode in everything

Our teams had to stay well-informed so we placed a strong focus on our internal communications. We shared real-time updates in our corporate channels, as well as via weekly TownHalls with CEO and Leadership Team members. This has shown unprecedented rise in the interest of our teams, and at some point, we realized that it sparked a new culture in our company – when office–based employees were gathering in one big room, with pizza and snacks to listen to the live TownHalls.  

The first two months of quarantine were rough for Symphony Solutions, like for many businesses out there on the market. We had to address operational efficiency, optimize the teams and reconsider a number of policies. On the upside, our clients were content with how we handled the official shift to virtual, although it has been a no-new experience for some of the teams.  

Initially, there were concerns about the productivity and efficiency of full WFH mode. As Adam Hickman from Gallup puts it, “The stigma of remote work is that it inhibits collaboration and productivity, which together may cost companies money” But eventually, with trying things out and adjusting on the go, WFH turned out to be the opposite. Ironically, WFH mode brought the different challenge – the challenge of over-working. At some point, one of our customers addressed us with a concern that their team is burning themselves by overworking and losing the precious work-life balance, as the lines of corporate and personal became blurred.  

We handled the problem through a set of solutions already available even before  – 1:1 coaching with People Partners, corporate psychologists and conversations with LM as well as by developing a new wellbeing program. 

Ironically, wfh mode brought the opposite challenge – the challenge of over-working

During regular 1:1s and internal surveys, we found out that people see benefits of returning to office. People said that working in office brings better team cohesion, and helps to get things done faster. On the other hand, many people have found a great range of benefits in working from home: from choosing the place from which they work, to better harmony in managing important aspects of their life besides work. 

In these surveys, people talked about all kinds of things: safety in times of danger, appreciated the opportunity of being asked about work either from office or home, talked a lot about their family reality, as well as benefits and restrictions of getting their homes as a workplace. People shared how their teams were getting used to working remotely. Many moaned about looking forward to getting back to office. Some  talked about missing office banter and the like. On the other hand, people also mentioned depression, anxiety and feeling of uncertainty about the future.  

The next period, starting late spring was that of expectation that the quarantine will end soon and the scenario of coming back to the office should be put in place. Following the WFH survey where 78% of respondents said they appreciate the chance of WFH during pandemia and are ready to go on like that up to 6 months or more and 92% claimed that their performance was 75-100% or above. So Symphony Solutions has officially renewed access to the office space for a third of our team following the official guidelines and sanitary norms. 

We could say we found the right balance between those who insisted (yes insisted!) on working from office, and those whose concerns about their or family members’ health let them appreciate all the opportunities that are there – unlimited WFH for the time being with the full list of benefits available, which Symphony Solutions has always been known for on the market. We also supported our office-based employees with free Covid diagnosis either at a company expense or covered by the corporate medical insurance.

This was also the time when our agility and insights from the market trends gave birth to our new business model – Symphony Anywhere. And we can now speak of 7 new hires within this business unit since then. The clear advantage is that the best talent is now within easy reach, the satisfaction level grows as people can work from virtually anywhere in the world. 

We understood that our new way of working called for availability, better structure and transparency of company processes and opportunities. This has initiated another HR initiative in WFH era – we have launched on-line Symphony handbook to make sure our processes are accessible from anywhere and for everyone.

Speaking of the near future, bringing our teams back to our workspaces will be easy for some, yet a personal dilemma for others.  People will want assurance that the space is safe, disinfected, following the strictest guidelines. Thus, we already have a checklist to go through, should the decision be made to return to the office. This includes, lesser people in the office than before, physical distance norms, working hours regulation etc. Although we have lived in this mode since March, hybrid workplace is the model which is most likely to be implemented. Under its new “hybrid workplace” guidance, employees will be allowed to spend less than half their working hours out of the office. We will continue with flexible approaches where possible and will definitely proceed nurturing physical and psychological well-being initiatives. Those team members who opt to stay home even when things roll back to normal will most probably have to give up their assigned desks, and will work in common spaces if they decided to pay the office a visit and see their teams. 

Looking into the future, hybrid workplace is the model which is most likely to be implemented

Going forward, we will be exploring new exciting business models as the size and flexibility of our business allows us to adjust quickly and actually become the trend setter. Wellbeing and overall support for the business will stay a clear HR priority. A bigger focus will be placed on team work in virtual, with front line leads, scrum masters and team leads being the center of the business vortex. New tools will be explored to serve as a communication platform. And a whole range of initiatives is underway for us to stay the same Symphony culture despite the actual location of our team members. While balancing business needs, we will offer as much flexibility as possible to accommodate the workstyles of every employee group to make sure they stay safe and productive to deliver the best quality service, and build a fulfilling and successful career with Symphony Solutions!  

About NO MORE Foundation

Symphony Solutions joined SHE.community in an initiative to spread awareness on the dreaded topic of domestic violence in the wake of the quarantine crisis. As it’s been noted by many social services, there is a rapid increase in home violence cases due to women often being stuck in lockdown and unable to seek help from abuse. Statistics show that every fourth woman in Ukraine at some point in her life becomes a victim of domestic abuse. In Poland about 250,000 people are victims of domestic violence every year. Since the lockdown, the number of incidents increased by 50 to 60%. These are only the reported cases.

NO MORE is a social awareness initiative that aims at giving the voice to those women who were left defenceless and vulnerable living in an abusive environment. Symphony Solutions and SHE. community are always standing at the forefront in the fight for gender equality and supporting women in their career and professional development. NO MORE social initiative strongly resonates with our values so this collaboration was an anticipated step, this time bringing light to the acute issues of home violence and women’s rights.

SHE. community was founded 2 years ago to promote gender equality. The goal of the community is to motivate everyone to change in society and help create a culture of security, equality and respect. That is why  SHE. community started researching the problem of domestic violence together with public organizations in three countries: Ukraine, Poland, and North Macedonia. These are three countries that the She. community has been focusing on since its foundation.

What Does Statistics Say?

•  Ukraine. The classic gap in the Ukrainian law enforcement system is imperfection or lack of a system for recording calls and keeping statistics, which is why it is often impossible to have an exact number of complaints from victims. Although the Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that there were no jumps in the number of appeals during the quarantine,  however,  the hotline provides information that the number of complaints has doubled.  

• Poland. The statistics show that about 250,000 people are victims of domestic violence every year. With the beginning of quarantine, the “hot line” here also recorded an increase in the number of appeals by 50%.  

• North Macedonia. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities say that there is no increase in reports of domestic violence,  however, human rights organizations insist that this is not the case. 

What Was Done?

Symphony Solutions and SHE. community aim to give a chance for a better life to women who have found themselves in dire circumstances. As a part of NO MORE campaign, the following activities have been done:  

• Company leaders recorded a video message that addresses the common problem of making up excuses for the abuser and blaming the victim. The initiative has been developed in collaboration with the NO MORE Foundation.

• Fundraising to help NGO with the rent of the apartment for social needs. As a result of this initiative, 16300 UAH were raised.  
• The workshop “Dream job: search instructions” was organized to help women take a turn in their career and find a job.  
• Social media brand awareness campaigns took place: #WOMENSUPPORTINGWOMEN and “NO MORE” during Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

About NO MORE Foundation 

NO MORE is the world’s largest domestic violence and sexual assault awareness initiative that’s ever been created in the history of women’s rights movements. It connects people from all kinds of backgrounds and diverse communities in a common goal to educate society and start a dialogue on the struggles victims of abuse and sexual assault. 

Read the full article on the topic here.

How to achieve excellent product delivery – main principles 

The end goal of every development team is to make sure that they are delivering an excellent product. This accounts for many criteria, software testing being an integral part of the process that brings about positive results. For example, establishing a QA system for Neo PLM helped our client to improve overall product quality and get new customers. So, what makes a good product in software and web development? Here are the principles that we firmly stand by in our commitment to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Quality Objectives 

Every project starts with an idea. The trick is to get to what’s behind it to know what objectives the client is pursuing. The product not only has to do the job – it has to do it right. An excellent product will perform well in the long run, meet user expectations, bringing value to the end-user, and, what’s probably of most interest for the company developing the software, make a profit. 

The first step in the product design is engaging with the client in order to understand their quality expectations. All this helps establish proper processes and design adequate KPIs and metrics aligned with business needs. 

Team commitment and Agile Test strategy 

In the Agile philosophy, the whole team commits to producing a high-quality product and therefore bears responsibility for product quality. To achieve this, cross-functional teams are built that include QA engineers embedded within the Scrum feature team. Dedicated teams focus on automation, functional and non-functional or regression testing. This allows us to capture a broader scope of testing and ensure positive results in every instance. 

Team commitment is a necessary part of the process which puts individual responsibility on par with that of a whole team. Each one needs to be a team player and commit to one mutual goal to deliver the best product possible. Only in this way, the team can achieve the desired level of commitment and take on the responsibilities.  

Quality attributes 

One of the important points to consider is to have QA engineers involved in the SDLC as early as possible. This way, when working out backlog stories and architecture blueprints, the QA team will make sure to consider such product quality attributes as testability, usability, maintainability, performance, and security. Usually, this happens during the planning stage and is aimed mainly at assisting Technical Leads and Architects in making proper architectural and technical decisions. Involving QA at an early stage enables significant savings on redevelopment or refactoring efforts due to design issues later on.  

Defect management 

The whole of the testing process can be boiled down to two instances: defect prevention and defect detection in already existing products. 

Defect prevention may be achieved by measuring different KPIs, analyzing results, taking improvement actions, as well as assessing the process on a regular basis. Aiming at preventing defects from the very start of the development process helps significantly reduce the cost of defects. At this stage, defect preventive actions are performed by developers and QA engineers. For instance, developers perform unit testing and code review as an important software engineering practice. QA engineers are involved in requirements and review sessions to make sure those are clear and testable. 

On the side of QA engineers, defect prevention is achieved by setting clear and testable requirements. 

The next stage would be defect detection in an already implemented product.  

Testing pyramid 

Test automation is another way to help maximize the effectiveness of the QA process. This involves writing scripts for executing repetitive tasks that are tedious or difficult to perform manually but still necessary for ensuring the overall quality of the software. The approach to automation depends on the product specifics, duration and complexity. 

Automation strategy is based on the test automation pyramid concept that originated from “Succeeding with Agile” by Mike Cohn. The pyramid model is divided into levels based on how much time and effort goes into implementing a certain test and generally looks like shown in the graph.  

The bulk of all automation tests should be unit tests made by developers. A regular approach is to automate regression scenarios because they are less frequently changed and require less maintenance. Automation is, however, necessary as regression scenarios are very time-consuming to run manually every sprint. Generally, the QA Manager identifies the most time-consuming test-sets in order to understand the effort needed to automate them. Those that are giving best time/cost savings with less automation effort are the best candidates for automation. 

Some automation testing should be devoted to component/integration/API tests, and very little UI/E2E tests as they are most frequently changed and the cost of maintenance could be high. Such a testing system is beneficial to build, especially for a complex solution, as in the case when we developed the QA process for Vivino cloud-based application that included backend (API) testing, frontend, and UI testing, mobile testing for Android and iOS.

The results of such analysis are then presented to the client with clear ROI outlined. Upon the delivery of the automation pack, a retrospective is conducted to see if the goal was reached within the estimated budget, and the results are presented back to the client.  

Quality control process 

Quality control is aimed at detecting and rectifying defects before the release to production and is performed mostly by QA engineers. Usually, it’s a combination of manual and automated testing activities that cover both functional and non-functional (usability, performance, load, security, etc.) requirements of the product in development. 

In quality control, a huge focus is on defects retesting and performing regression testing after the product has been debugged. This is to make sure that the existing stable functionality hasn’t been broken and new defects didn’t appear as a result of fixing previous defects.  

Root cause analysis 

An important part of the software testing approach is conducting a retrospective analysis of the development bugs and production incidents. Testing team analyses failed releases and other issues which might give valuable insights and pinpoint an area for improvement of the processes and documentation. Runbooks are prepared and updated in order to minimize the impact in the future.  

Exploratory testing 

Alongside classic regression and in-sprint quality control tests, exploratory testing is infused into software testing flow to avoid pesticide paradox. With exploratory testing testers discover those bugs that survived previous runs of testing before they will be seen by the end-users.  

Time-boxed exploratory testing session approach is applied to help manage cost and maximize return.  

Risk-based testing 

Risk-based testing approach is utilized when there is a high need to prioritize tasks based on the risk of failure and its possible impact. It is frequently used for projects with hard deadlines and limited time for QC. The QA Manager defines the testing scope based on analyzed risks, highlights the probability of risks occurrence and prioritizes QC activities based on it. This type of testing approach allows the best test coverage in a limited time for testing. 

In risk-based testing, the QA Manager and Service Delivery Manager are responsible for risks mitigation and contingency plans.  

Quality gates

Well-documented and strictly followed quality gates allow for quick decision-making, ensure high quality, and prevent rework. Usually, all stakeholders take part in defining the quality gates. Once those are approved, all the parties involved commit to following the defined policies. Quality gates are the milestone that makes it possible for the development process to move forward. The transition between phases cannot happen unless the quality gates are met. 

Example of a process with defined quality gates:  

QA process monitoring 

QA process is continuously monitored and assessed by the QA Manager. Moreover, all team members are encouraged to suggest enhancements. 

The test strategy document specifies the types of metrics that are used for tracking the QA process which are considered when correcting and improving the process. This is done on a regular basis to ensure that the QA process corresponds to the client’s quality requirements and expectations. Action items are agreed on team retrospective meetings.  

Quality assistance Approach 

A move from quality assurance to quality assistance has a positive impact on the overall efficiency and independence of the team, as well as shows improvement in quality. This approach is aimed at preventing rather than detecting defects in the software.  

Best results can be achieved when functions in the Scrum team have a good understanding of all processes. With a quality assistance approach, developers go an extra mile and do more testing at the ‘design and build’ stage to ensure that more bugs have been captured before the code goes to testers. This requires a paradigm shift and some time, as developers will have to pay more attention to the quality of their work.  

Project Audits 

Regular internal audits are an integral part of the overall software development process. It ensures that:  

• all processes and practices are successfully implemented and followed by everyone in the teams.  
• all communications and information sharing are timely and efficient. 
• delivery outputs correspond to SDLC standards.  

We explore every function and interview all key team members, as well as recently onboarded engineers to see if their understanding of processes is similar. It’s essential for the team to understand the business needs and translate them into quality indicators. It’s also investigated if the team members put all possible and reasonable efforts to achieve the highest possible quality. This internal service is provided by the functional office, Service Delivery Organization.  

To conclude

In a race for maximum client satisfaction, as an inherent part of our QA services, we apply software testing methodologies and effectively use QA best practices that have proven to drive real and imminent results. We take on a comprehensive look at the software development process and strive to introduce software testing practices early on in the SDLC. This allows to ensure the quality of the product that is in development on every step of the process. 

Vivino coming into the spotlight

A great deal of work was done before even the official launch of the company in 2010. The team developed a website with basic functionality allowing users to upload pictures of wine and leave reviews. The development team initially uploaded 5000 photos to the database to get the website going and encourage other users to do the same, even running contests of who’d upload the most pictures and presenting the winner with a corkscrew. The website quickly went on the rise and in 2014 would receive up to 250 000 pictures of wine per day from users from all around the world. 

Vivino App was launched in 2011 and immediately started garnering attention. With a massive database in your pocket, it was as easy as ever to pick a bottle of wine while doing your regular shopping at the supermarket. The app was steadily growing in popularity and evolving. Every new picture meant more valuable information about the wine, what the users liked or preferred. A more extensive database allowed the development team to add new functionality and features, and eventually an online marketplace that is currently operating in 14 countries. 

It’s fair to say that Vivino app is the go-to choice of a wine app. It’s being featured in the app store as the App of the Day or Editor’s choice time and time again. Like this Valentine’s Day, when Vivino App garnered this recognition in 95 countries. 

Symphony joins the game

In 2013 Vivino got its first big investment and, after some consideration, it was decided to bring together a team in Lviv and get Symphony Solutions on board as the company’s primary software development contractor. 

Symphony Solutions’ development team works on adding new features into the Vivino app, such as backend and frontend, database modeling, as well as integrations with new services. All the while, current data pipelines and processes are being supported to ensure that the app works without a hitch, delivering value to users at all times. As the app grows, its performance and response times need to be improving as well. And then there’s the yearly busy season when the app is experiencing high load for Christmas and New Year’s. Our engineering team is refining the Vivino app in preparation, mainly within our cloud native development services, to ensure that the app works at its highest performance and Vivino users don’t experience any inconveniences. 

The Vivino development team is dedicated to delivering high-quality code, testing and fine-tuning the app, covering all steps of the development process. This way, Vivino users get to enjoy a great and functional app. 

Symphony Solutions Vivino team is located in Lviv office, Ukraine. Tightly knit together and dedicated to the cause, Vivino guys are working hard on making the best wine app possible.  

The world’s largest wine community

Vivino app is available for download in the app store and has over 45 million users worldwide. The biggest share of the market is in the United States, with around 9 million users. France, Brazil and Italy are caught up in a race for the second and third places with 3.7, 3.4 and 3.3 million users respectively. It’s easy to tell from the stats that Vivino app is well received all around the world, with the majority of its users comprising the US and Europe.

Vivino app is available in 15 different languages with more being added as the market share grows in other countries. 

Vivino database has more than 1470 grapes, the most popular based on the number of wines in the database being Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir – all originally from France. The app offers its users an exquisite choice of 12 162 845 wines across 227 174 wineries in 3199 wine regions. Vivino’s home-grown wine connoisseurs have rated almost every wine you can think of from every corner of the world, except for maybe Antarctica. 

Vivino Wine Style Awards

Vivino opens up a whole world of delectable wines from budget-friendly to outrageously expensive. Whether you’ve got the taste buds of Antonio Galloni or the palate of a five-year-old, they’ve got you covered. 

What makes it even better is that the soul and driving force of the app are the people using it. After all, it is a rating app, so it’s all about people sharing their piece of mind, recommending wine, and discovering new brands and tastes. 

The people have spoken and thus, since 2016, Vivino has been celebrating the best wines of the year with Vivino Wine Style Awards. Top ten highest rated wines are chosen across the most unique wine style categories sorted by country, some of them being Bordeaux Pomerol, Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, Tuscan Red, Uruguay Tannat, Italian Barbaresco, Austrian Zweigelt, and many more. 

Vivino Wine Style Awards showcase the latest trends on the market, based solely on the voice of the people. A wine has to get at least 50 reviews in a year prior to get on the list, and those that make it are quite literally top of the crop. 

Vivino app: How it works

Adding much to the popularity of Vivino, the app operates similarly to a social network. Users can follow one another, post photos to their feeds, like and comment – the same way it works on Instagram, Facebook and any other social media platform. You can also like and comment on other user’s wine ratings, add wine to your wishlist or share it with your friends. 

So, you’ve downloaded the app and set up your account. What’s next? You can use wine-explorer to browse the already existing massive database of wines or start building your own collection using something that is called labelscan. Take a picture of a wine bottle label that you’d like to add to your account or get more information on. An image recognition engine processes the labelscan and compares it with the other pictures in Vivino’s back-end database. Once there’s a match, the app will show you the information about the wine: rating, taste characteristics, price. 

The database as it now is, allows for automatic recognition of 97,5% of scanned labels. The rest of the labelscans are handled by the data team who manually match and add the wine to the database. This way around 200-500 new wine labels are added to the database daily. 

Vivino app can give you an idea of what kind of wine you’re purchasing as well as the average price for your region. Average prices are collected across retail shops in the region and through feeds. Data is updated regularly, for some merchants twice a day, and usually is no older than three days. The app then shows you the average price of the bottle based on the collected data. 

Vivino wine rating system

Vivino grades wines on a scale of 1 to 5 which is different from the traditional Robert Parker’s 100-point system that is used for rating wines. This was a deliberate choice to make something that the consumer is already familiar with. A 5-star scale is used to rate hotels, restaurants, stores. It’s the go-to rating system used online for rating business pages, mobile apps in the app store, products on e-commerce websites. However, when it comes to the accuracy of the ratings, the average user rating is perfectly aligned with that of professional critics. The average Vivino rating is 3.6 stars. Anything above that means the wine is good and a rating of 4 stars and more is extremely good. 

Vivino Market: One click to order

In 2017 Vivino Market was launched and is now a perk that can be enjoyed in countries with the most activity, while the team is working on adding more locations. This digital marketplace allows merchants and consumers to find one another. Going beyond mere wine recommendations, Vivino now offers its users in select countries to purchase their wine of choice in the app and get it delivered to their home. 

If you’re browsing the wine selection and notice a green button next to available wines, you’re lucky to live in one of the 14 countries where Vivino Market is up and running. Go ahead and tap that button! It’s been a long day – get yourself a nice bottle of Chianti. 

The dedicated Vivino team makes sure that all orders pass quality control. All the while, the app opens up a sea of opportunities for sellers with an option to target customers in certain locations as well as discover new market possibilities and grow business as a Vivino Merchant Partner. 

What’s next for Vivino?

So, what can be next in store for the greatest wine app as viewed by wine lovers around the world? Vivino team is beaming with ideas and is working on delivering exciting new features and functionality with the user in mind. 

As the app grows and more and more people join the wine community, Vivino team will be working on localization for the largest audiences and making the marketplace available in even more countries. 

One of the major new perks currently being implemented is User Preferences which is partly already available for a “test drive”. The feature lets you create your own personalized Taste Profile based on your previously rated wines, purchases and even pageviews. With enough information gathered, the feature then analyzes your personal likes and dislikes and creates a Preference Profile. It accounts for such wine characteristics as taste, grape, style and type. Then your preferences are analyzed by region and price. As a result of this thorough analysis, you’ll get personal recommendations delivered right to your inbox and notifications. What better way to discover your next favorite? 

This is the latest trend with many companies that came about as a way to stay unbiased and let the users make decisions on factors other than objective opinions of a handful of random “critics”. It’s all about that personal touch now, whether it comes to custom products and services or personalized in-app recommendations. 

Symphony Solutions and Vivino recently celebrated their 7th anniversary of business partnership. Symphony Solutions has spent seven amazing years working with Vivino and is ready for at least seven more. 

Crisis and Quarantine

Theo Schnitfink, Founder and CEO of Symphony Solutions, said in one of his early, highly popular weekly Town Hall broadcasts.

“During times of difficulty and crisis, our bonds are strengthened – bonds with each other, with our clients, and within our communities. As a result, we come away with tighter relationships.”

That is what is happening at Symphony Solutions. People and clients responded positively to the new model of work that we were able to quickly introduce due to the flexible nature of Symphony Solutions and our ability to motivate and remain Agile in the face of circumstances. And throughout all the scrambling, the company signed two contracts with new clients and increased regionality with an existing client. 

Taking Action

Symphony Solutions faced the newly surfaced problems head-on and jumped right into action, shifting its focus that’s been knocked out of balance with the unexpected change brought upon by COVID-19. 

To make sure that all Symphonians are regularly updated on the current situation in the company, we’ve started conducting weekly town halls for all office locations using MS Teams. The Leadership Team informs all Symphonians on the current state of the matter regarding the COVID-19 lockdown, updates in company policies as well as the business side of things. All Symphonians are encouraged to send their questions and concerns to the town hall email, which are promptly being addressed. 

We have engaged all of our means of internal communication to ensure that every Symphonian is well-informed and knows what to expect. 

Safety in the office

Symphony Solutions management went above and beyond in ensuring that Symphonians are safe and not exposed to the risk of getting infected. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been decided to make a shift to work from home mode for all of the offices, strictly limiting the number of people allowed in the office, giving priority to those in essential roles. 

However, even in lockdown, there were people who preferred to work in the office. The Facility team of Symphony Solutions took on the responsible mission to make the office a safe and comfortable place for them.

Coming to the office is completely voluntary and Symphonians are strongly recommended to work from home. This especially applies to those who have small children, elderly parents, or are in a group of risk themselves. 

A list of protective measures and recommendations has been developed. A limit has been set on the number of people allowed in the meeting rooms. Social distancing is strongly encouraged. Stickers and informative material have been designed to remind people of the safety measures. Symphonians who come to the office are provided with protective masks, gloves, and hand sanitizers. The offices are regularly cleaned and disinfected.

Supporting Symphonians working from home

While the offices are taken care of, the majority of Symphonians have quickly adjusted to working from the safety of their homes. The shift to WFH happened in a matter of one day and proved to be very efficient. 

This has probably to do with Symphony Solutions being an international and multicultural company. Symphony Solutions has always had people from different countries working on the same teams. In terms of software and equipment, everything has long been covered. 

The sudden shift in scale stirred uncertainties in those first days of lockdown. Adapting to the new way of life may have seemed challenging at first, but in practice showed good potential and positive results. 

In fact, the clients have been so impressed with the way Symphony Solutions handled the situation, that they adapted many of our practices in organizing remote work and coordinating teams. 

Symphony Academy

Major changes had to be implemented in the way Symphony handled its numerous internal and external events. 

Symphony Academy was quick to adjust and moved to virtual education conducting its trainings online from the very first week of quarantine. In just two months, there were 45 events for Symphonians – tech hubs, soft skills trainings and upskillings. With all the trainings being conducted online, more people than ever were able to join, and so, even at this time, we continued to learn and grow professionally. 

In the time of quarantine, Symphony English teachers launched the English for Specific Purposes course for all Symphonians eager to improve their professional language skills. And more tech-oriented Symphonians were able to accomplish a 16-class React Course. 

SHE. events

SHE. community took on a proactive role in supporting the community in this uneasy time, focusing on educating people on the current situation. 

We invited healthcare professionals to speak on the topics of keeping your physical and mental health in check, as well as leveling up your at home well-being practices. 

A series of webinars were dedicated to managing stress levels when working from home, and even a quarantine “boot camp” for parents with small children. 

Lifting the spirits of Symphonians in lockdown

One of the challenges in this quarantine is certainly that people were now devoid of the social aspects of working in the office. 

As a reminder, that we’re all in this together and that we’ve got one another’s back, the marketing team started a flashmob on social media, asking Symphonians to post pictures of themselves working from home with the hashtag #SymphonyWFH. Symphonians from all locations enthusiastically participated and sent pictures from Lviv, Rzeszow, Krakow, Skopje, Belgium and the Netherlands. Many posted pictures with their children and even pets, which was a flashmob in and of itself. 

A lot of work has been done in improving communication since the start of lockdown. Understanding how detrimental isolation may be for mental health, we are encouraging Symphonians to be active in our channels of communication and participate in the social life of the company even if it has to be shifted to online for now. 

We share because we care

Even in these dire times, Symphony Solutions never forgot about our charitable initiatives. Some pioneered by Symphonians themselves, others taken upon in our good will to give back to the community. We are always ready to respond to requests from NGOs and participate in community projects and initiatives that correlate with our core values. 

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve taken an active position in the fight against the virus. Symphony Solutions in Lviv joined the emergency project United for Health by Lviv IT Cluster aimed at purchasing testing kits and working closely with the Coronavirus emergency operation center in Lviv. We’ve collected donations to purchase PPE and other essentials for local hospitals and ambulance substations. 

We’ve also responded to a request of a local NGO to help children from low-income families. We’ve donated computer equipment for the children to use to continue their studies online while the schools and learning facilities are closed for quarantine. 

Not to forget about charity causes on a smaller scale, we are collecting donations to help out local animal shelters. On top of that, Symphonians at the Lviv office stepped up and rescued two stray kittens nearby the office building. The kittens have had a vet check up and are taken care of while waiting for a forever home. 

In a time like this, our hearts go out to all those who are in need. A single drop makes an ocean. Being a part of this community, we take responsibility wherever it’s in our means to help. 

The Light Ahead

Symphony Solutions will continue its corporate social responsibilities, especially meaningful now, and will service clients in new and inventive ways. We will continue to reach and engage employees openly and frequently, but the predominant message throughout all of this is the coming together of people in heart, mind, and spirit. Just as Theo Schnitfink said, the bonds are stronger and so are we. 

Opportunities around personalisation

With the introduction of AI technologies, online casinos are ready to take the next step in offering personalized experiences to their players. A lot of inspiration can be drawn from outside the industry, where personalisation has already become a significant factor in garnering traction. Steam, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and other streaming services and leading retailers are just some of the companies that are making good use of the innovations with personalised search, recommendations and relevant product placement on high traffic pages. 

Many steps that make the experience of the player more personalised may seem obvious yet are often neglected. Addressing these will have immediate positive results. Competitor research shows that even simple improvements, such as showing trending games, generate increased engagement proving the importance of having personalised content. We have seen that many operators have been challenged in implementing true 1:1 personalization in-house. 

With all the technologies and data at their fingertips, gaming operators have a solid opportunity to gain a competitive edge and leverage personalisation as the core engine of growth. 

Benefits of AI hyper-personalisation in iGaming

We cannot underestimate the benefits of personalisation in our dynamic time. Nowadays, people are bombarded with information every time they pick up their mobile phones. Playing on the go and subject to being easily distracted, the player is spoilt with the abundance of gaming opportunities, leaving the operators just a small window where they can grab the player’s attention and pitch their product. Furthermore, personalisation offered on non-gaming sites is becoming the norm, so naturally, the customers expect to see the same performance and quality of implementation when they go to Casino sites. 

Another trend you may observe is that customers who play a higher variety of games are more likely to carry on playing for longer. This brings up the next challenge – how do you introduce new games to dedicated players? One way that you may notice lobby managers dealing with this issue is when they turn the home page into an enormous catalogue of games. However, quantity doesn’t always mean quality. 

For once, gaming operators need to figure out how to deliver relevant types of games, display them where the player is most likely to see the recommendation, based on previous behavior and taking player preferences into consideration. Now that you’ve made sure that the players click on the recommended game, next you want them to like it enough to continue playing. If done correctly, you’ll notice a significant uplift in turnover and retention rate, as well as the variety of games played. 

The benefits of personalised content are quite obvious. As a player, you don’t have to waste time going through the website and looking for games, as the algorithm has already learned your preferences – you are offered an easy to consume “menu” right upon login. Imagine it as a supermarket where you go to do your shopping every week. You always buy the same things and each time have to make the same route through the isles to get your shopping done. But what if you could walk into a supermarket and see all the products you usually buy right at the entrance? No more need to wander around the store to pick up bread in aisle 3 and milk in aisle 9. That’s what personalisation does. These are tools that learn and help predict customer behaviour. 

Of course, a website or an online casino is different in a way that your customer doesn’t have an essential need to be there. If they find the website confusing, they’ll click away in a second and you may as well consider your customer gone for good. That’s what makes it so important to grab the potential client’s attention right from the very beginning. 

Challenges when integrating AI personalisation solutions

Integration of AI technologies is simpler than you might think, however, challenges arise when trying to connect various data points. Collecting data is just the first step. What you do with it next makes the difference. 

• How do you transfer information about gameplay into your CMS tool to show recently played games? 
• How long can you keep this information to make sure that you deliver the best experience to long tenure players? 
• How quickly can you analyse behaviour and come up with recommendations? 
• Can you predict the customer’s next action and prevent them from leaving the site? 

Another challenge can be with resources. Most of the companies have a delivery road map and sometimes your projects for optimisation of the product don’t receive the level of prioritization they deserve. That’s why it’s easier in some cases to use external suppliers in order to deliver the desired project. 

Integration typically takes only 4-6 weeks; this is due to the fact that Graphyte integration process has now been fine-tuned to the point when we can successfully integrate rapidly. Once you have it on site, you want to make sure that it’s working properly and you’re seeing what you want to see. Generally, the process is very straightforward and there are very few places where it can go wrong. 

Financial upsides

Personalisation allows for cross-selling players to new products with up to 70% uplift on turnover. For instance, if you have regular bingo players who stick to only that one product, you can try recommending them slots, which have a reference to their previous experience of bingo rooms. It will result in an initial uplift that will gradually drop down as the novelty wears off, bringing less impressive yet stable uplift. 

Other important and co-related KPIs would be the variety of games played and retention rate. If the player likes the games you recommend, they are more likely to return to your casino site. After introducing personalised recommendations, Graphyte saw a 50% increase in conversion. Increased session duration comes as a nice bonus, as an engaged player will keep coming back to your site and staying for longer. 

Another positive dynamic was observed in a significant reduction of the dependency on bonusing to engage players. When testing personalised recommendations with added bonus vs. no bonus, customers responded better when no additional perks were offered. The players who received recommendations with no offer were twice more likely to try a new game. Why is that the case? Let’s say that you offered a player to spend £15 on a game to get free spins. Other than the bonus, there’s no indication that the player will enjoy the game enough to keep playing and spend more than the initial £15, or even use the free spins for that matter. With no bonus, the player might spend £1 or £100 – the only thing that matters is if the game is fun to make the player want to keep coming back and voluntarily spend more.  

With the implementation of personalisation for online betting apps, Graphyte showed a 1000% ROI and rising. Essentially, there’s no limit to the ROI you can generate with personalisation as there will always be new opportunities and new games to invest in. 

Key takeaways

Responsible gaming becomes a more and more significant factor, especially with regulations on gambling put in place in many locations. Content is once again king. Personalisation is the future solution for CRM and on-site campaigns. The benefits of introducing AI personalisation solutions are a no-brainer. Consider the cost of delay incurred by not implementing it. 

If you want to make the best of AI technologies and leverage hyper-personalisation in your online gaming business, here are some of the points to keep in mind: 

• Resist the temptation to try to build the software in-house, use an external resource instead. 
• Personalise the lobby. Deliver a personalised home page with a dynamic lobby. 
• Always have customer experience in mind.
• Don’t try to resolve every problem at the same time, build a dedicated solution for each KPI you want to increase. 
• Test and analyse your results to make sure you deliver the best possible experience for your players. 

Artificial intelligence: an overview

Artificial Intelligence covers a multitude of areas in technologies including but not limited to Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Neural Networks, and Knowledge Representation. 

Companies using artificial intelligence have an obvious advantage that helps them stand out from the competition. AI introduces solutions for operating bigger data volumes faster with no need to factor in human error or inconsistencies, meaning that we are left with solid data and analytics stripped of any bias. This means that we can apply the data-based research with high accuracy which can be crucial if we are operating in the medical field and making predictions for patient outcomes or look into making an investment and need to analyze the stock market. 

Just like that, AI can be applied to any field that operates on big data: medicine, environmental studies, socioeconomics, education and scientific research. Given a large database of information, deep learning can be applied – analyzing the data, finding patterns and making predictions based on the AI model. Smart technologies learn the more data they process meaning that the algorithms and output of the AI-driven systems improve with time and the more information you introduce into the system for analysis. 

AI services

Artificial Intelligence services can be applicable across industries and customized to meet the needs of the consumers. AI-based services largely depend on the type of data that you offer the system for analysis, so there’s a wide range of products and services, and ways that they can be applied in real life. AI systems may operate on all types of data: visual, audio, text, data and so on. 

AI Vision Systems

AI is used in image recognition which is applied in practice in the medical field (e.g. processing scans for diagnostics and planning treatment). A similar principle is used in face recognition systems that may identify a person from a digital image. These technologies, called Face unlock and Face ID, are already being used by Android and Apple appropriately to let you unlock your screen or certain apps on your smartphone by simply scanning your face. Face recognition technology is now in high demand so we may expect more advances in this area soon. 

Speech recognition

Speech recognition systems may seem on the other side of the spectrum but utilize similar principles and technology. It is used in speech-to-text software as well as for voice–operated home assistant devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home, and smart assistants Siri or Google Assistant for smartphones. 

Dragon NaturallySpeaking developed by Dragon Systems, Massachusetts is another example of utilizing AI for audio data processing. It’s the most long-standing speech-to-text software on the market with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Dragon is used by doctors, lawyers, writers and other professionals for voice transcription and captioning. 

ML and NLP

Personalizing user experience is an example of AI service that’s particularly in demand now, becoming an integral part of technological progress and a driving factor in digital transformation in many industries. Heavily based on machine learning, AI-based systems analyze user behavior and come up with personalized recommendations aimed at enhancing user experience and creating a higher-quality product or service. As an example, we at Symphony Solutions, have developed an AI-driven personalized recommendations engine for the gaming industry for our client Graphyte. AI, that helps iGaming providers achieve higher conversions and user engagement metrics. All these personalization solutions utilize both machine learning and natural language processing. 

As it often happens, ML and NLP go hand in hand and complement one another. Such is also the case in machine translation, where AI is used to analyze language patterns and produce a text equivalent in a foreign language. Neural machine translation is rapidly progressing and expanding to new areas. Whereas some fifteen years ago you would have to purchase pricey translation software, now all the functionality is easily available for free and without a drop in quality in online translation services like Google Translate. Moreover, companies like Facebook and Twitter are integrating this functionality applying the principles of machine learning to provide a better user experience and connect users across all continents, erasing the language barriers that stand in the way of communication. 

Some other examples of AI services are chatbots, handwriting recognition, credit risk determination, spam detection, parsing of data, predictive analytics, etc. 

Benefits of AI solutions for business

Companies that incorporate Artificial Intelligence solutions in their core values reap the benefits of the technical progress and the informational revolution as we are all standing at the dawn of a new era of virtual transformation and automation.

AI is indispensable in dynamic environments, requiring you to work with data on a large scale. It makes data processing faster and more efficient, as it’s specifically designed to work in a data-intense environment and learn through operating large volumes of data and analyzing information. Combining Artificial Intelligence services with Cloud Computing would be something to consider in this regard as it gives instant advantages in terms of data manipulation. Cloud environment allows you to store massive volumes of data and makes it easily accessible.

With automating many tasks and reducing the need for human labor, companies can significantly lower operational costs. This means that funds may be redistributed or repurposed for further economic benefit.

AI powered solutions operate large amounts of data and consolidate information that is later used to analyze the market and economic prospects of the company. All this directly affects and improves the decision-making process, making it more timely and precise with a better outlook for the future.

Increased team productivity is another expected result of AI implementation. One may argue that it comes at a cost as human labor is being replaced with automated algorithms making many roles redundant. However, where some job titles become obsolete, new ones emerge. It’s all part of the technological and economical evolution of our society that can hardly be stopped or reversed. Teams that embrace AI are more efficient and keep their focus on the bigger picture.

Utilizing intelligent workflows with AI services allows companies to enhance customer experience. This can be realized in a number of ways, like for example, chatbots with predetermined algorithms that analyze messages from the customer and give out a relevant automated response. This minimizes the time in which the customer gets a solution to their problem to mere seconds, leaving only the heavy-duty tasks to customer service operators. Integrating natural language processing gives a more personal touch to this semi-automated communication, making it seamless and natural. This hybrid customer service is time-efficient and effective.

These are just some of the benefits of introducing AI services into business operations. As technology progresses, there will come new opportunities and applications with the potential to completely change the way we run our economy.

Examples of companies using artificial intelligence

IBM’s Cognitive Enterprise and Yara

AI can help push for a drastic change in the way the company operates, making a complete transformation and stepping onto the forefront of innovation and technology. IBM is leaping forward in this regard with their concept of a Cognitive Enterprise. 

Yara International is a farming company in Singapore that fully embraces digital transformation and, with the help of IBM, is steady on its way to becoming a Cognitive Enterprise. IBM and Yara have been working together since 2019 on a way to introduce data science into agriculture. They encourage using AI in analyzing the vast amounts of data collected from drones, soil testing, observing weather patterns, in predicting crop outcomes and planning for better yield. 

With over 620 million families occupied in farming, it’s inevitable to see many sectors in agriculture become more and more fragmented. IBM helps Yara create AI technologies specifically tailored to suit the needs of agriculture and use the data that’s already available to create a more sustainable farming model. 

Using AI solutions helps predict change in weather patterns and other factors conditioning the farming outcome. Equipped with data, farmers can produce better crop yields more consistently and meet the rapidly growing global market demand. The intelligent approach to farming also means that the soil won’t be exhausted in a matter of years because of neglect or overfarming. The crops are better quality as farmers can be more precise in zoning farmland for development, seed selection and sowing, using fertilizer, tending to the plants, and harvesting. 

NHS and AI solutions

The National Healthcare System in the UK is already set on its way to leverage artificial intelligence as the driving force in transforming its approach to early diagnostics and prevention of diseases. The UK government predicts that by the year 2030 the healthcare sector will be positively revolutionized with the use of AI technologies and big data. 

When it comes to healthcare, the AI has seemingly unlimited possibilities. Given the sheer volume of data that flows through the system every day, it’s a data scientists’ dream come true. All the data available for analysis helps train AI systems and build algorithms for predicting disease, planning the best possible treatment, and improving the prospects of the patient. One of the examples of using AI in medicine is EMBRY, an AI-based app, that is able to predict diseases, personalize treatments, help medical staff to increase their efficiency, and has great potential in increasing IVF success rates.
AI automates and streamlines mundane time-consuming tasks, leaving the healthcare professionals more time to spend on patient care and building a personal connection that gives back the healthcare system its humane face. 

One of the AI solutions that has already made its way into the healthcare system in the UK is Google’s DeepMind AI technology. DeepMind has been working with the NHS since 2016 and developed technology for automatic detection of serious eye conditions like glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy. The system analyzes the scans of the patient’s retina in real-time and evaluates how progressed the disease is, giving it an “urgency score”. DeepMind is preparing to launch the system for commercial use, although it might take some time before the new technology gets a green light from the regulatory authorities and is ready for wide-spread use. 

What’s next?

Companies that are using AI right now, stand at the forefront of a new revolution. Our society and business are changing through innovative thinking and emerging technologies. 

Many see the integration of AI technologies with cloud computing as the next step in this process. As already mentioned, cloud services are a tried and proven, cost-effective way to store massive amounts of data with instant access from any part of the world. Cloud makes it easier to get started with AI technologies that need to access and operate these large amounts of data. 

It’s important to understand that cloud computing and AI solutions can greatly benefit the economy and the progression in tech, if they come hand in hand, combining the best of both worlds. 

The question, whether or not to implement AI solutions in business or certain industries, doesn’t even arise. The answer is an obvious “yes”. This is the future we can see right before our eyes, and we’ve already dipped our toes into it. Those who have the wit and guts to take the next step will lead the way of the technological transformation with a complete shift in mindset. 

The future is now. And it’s virtual, intelligent, and agile. 

Empowering the Lobby Manager with personalisation

Casino lobby personalisation has been hovering somewhere between nascent and non-existent for the past couple of years, in spite of genuine strides forward in the tech space with bespoke products built to serve the niche. 

The value of a highly-tuned and personalised lobby cannot be overstated. We all know that the lobby is the hub of any digital casino, seen by every user and responsible for the vast majority of game launches.  

On the surface of it, the concept is simple – make it easy for players to find the games they love to play, whilst simultaneously surfacing the new games that keep players interested and drive so much – how hard can it be? 

What are the blockers?

The reality is more complex. Firstly (and wrongly), the core concepts, delivery and therefore understanding of the benefits of personalisation rarely sit within the operations teams that ultimately govern and manage which games go on the site, and where they sit on the lobby and category pages. 

The tooling that drives personalisation is in almost every case not designed with gaming operations in mind, with many of the standard solutions built for e-commerce merchandisers in mind (at best), and quite often requiring developer-level knowledge of front-end site manipulation to bring in any real changes. 

This lack of agility and usability can create an insurmountable barrier for fast-moving operations teams, all of whom are in a constant cycle of new releases and ongoing inventory management often at a frenetic pace and anything that adds to workload is never likely to be adopted. 

Commercial Constraints

Beyond the tooling and agility barriers are the often highly complex commercial arrangements around exclusivity and supplier coverage on the lobby, which create a constant headache for lobby managers across the entire gaming industry. Finding a way to integrate a personalised element alongside the commercial constraints can feel like a labyrinthian task at the best of times. 

Our insight

We’ve been working with multiple gaming operators over the last couple of years, in constant dialogue with customer experience and marketing teams for sure, and ever more closely with operations teams.  

Hearing these challenges consistently across our customer base led us to understand that a) there has to be a better way to manage both an optimised customer experience that fits with the huge challenge of running a gaming site, and b) embedding personalisation into core operations is the absolute sure-fire way of generating additional yield from the core customer base without needing to ramp up marketing spend 

What’s the solution

Last year, Graphyte launched a product called Intelligent Layouts to do exactly that. The casino product is aimed squarely at solving all these issues in one package.  

Designed specifically for lobby managers and customer experience teams, it brings the best of both worlds, allowing full control over content categories, exclusive and promoted content whilst at the same time driving deep personalisation wherever possible, all delivered through a simple integration to the existing CMS. 

In-built de-duplication technology solves the very real problem of showing the same titles multiple times on the same page, and the inclusion of a mixture of regularly played and new titles across the lobby creates a genuinely unique experience for every player, whether they prefer live casino, slots or scratchcards (or all three). 

Payoff

We have seen in our client base, without exception, that deep personalisation of the lobby is the single biggest driver of core staking to the existing user base, with top-line staking increases of over than 5%. This from a technology that utilises existing CMS and back end platforms, therefore keeping costs to a minimum, and requires no change to the workflow for operations teams. 

Symphony Solutions is happy to have taken part in helping its partner  turn this solution from the proof of concept to a full-fledged product successfully used by betting and gaming operators.   

The What, How and Why of Service Design

First, let’s try and understand what service design is, where does it come from, what are the problems it tackles. How does it work and most importantly, how it’s beneficial to end–users and the business?

What is Service Design?

The term ‘service design’ goes way back to 1982 when it was coined by Lynn Shostack. Shostack’s idea was that organizations should try and understand how their behind-the-scenes processes work and interact with each other as opposed to leaving services to be managed as separate pieces, which consequently creates a service that reacts slowly to market needs and makes a company more vulnerable.  

Nielsen Norman Group defines service design as “an activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to directly improve the employee’s experience, and indirectly, the customer’s experience.” 

So what is ‘service design thinking’? An activity, a toolset, a mindset, a process, a cross-disciplinary language, or a management approach – there are different ways to interpret it. But all these versions have one ultimate common goal – which is to design services that are beneficial for both the customer and the business. From the customer perspective, these services have to be useful, usable and should be desirable by them. Whilst for the business they have to be effective, efficient and have a point of difference from that which is offered on the market by their competitors. It tries to find the sweet spot between what people need and what is technically feasible for the business strategy.

How does it work?

Service design draws the iceberg analogy and states that the product is just the tip of the iceberg while there’s plenty to discover beneath the surface, ln the same way that a user’s journey beyond the product affects the overall expectations toward the product; both digital and nondigital parts that impact the product; integration with other products, and business resources.  

Just like experience design, that takes into account the design of multiple components like visuals, features, and information architecture, service design also has main components that need to be designed: 

• People – anyone who either creates, uses the service or someone who may be directly affected by the service; 
• Products – physical or digital artifacts required to perform the service; 
• Processes – workflows, procedures or rituals that are performed either by an employee or a user throughout the service.  

Image Source: Nielsen Norman Group

Why do businesses need service design thinking?

• Service design breaks silos. There is a tendency of large organizations to form silo mentalities in some departments or around some people which means that little or no fresh perspective has a chance to break in, is something service design tries to change. It ensures that new ideas are exchanged, that there is a collaboration between departments and that the end–user is not adversely affected. 

• It leads the way customers experience the company. Creating a great service or product is not enough anymore. What makes companies stand out for their clients is the image they create, their brand along with the service they provide.  

• Enhancing your business by delivering value to the customer. Service design assumes that sweet spot between delivering value to your customers and taking into account their needs but at the same time keeping business goals and resources in mind.

• Customer-oriented approach and positive customer experience. Saying you are a customer-oriented company and being one is not the same. Companies that genuinely care about the experience of their customers should involve them in the product development process and review the operations with the help of service design.

Besides this, there are even more benefits of applying Service Design for product launch along with Lean Agile approach.

Service Design vs. Customer Experience vs. User Experience

For anyone working with digital products the question still remains – what is the difference between service design and user experience design? And if we want to dig even deeper, how about customer experience?  

Let’s start by quickly establishing what is a user experience design and customer experience.  

User experience design (UX) deals with anything that a user comes across, be it an app, a website, or something physical like a store. The significant difference here is that UX is about everything that customers interact with which is visible, while customer experience (CX) also includes what is beneath this line of visibility: backend supporting staff, systems, policies, and things that users don’t see.

Image Source: Nielsen Norman Group

What about UX vs. CX differences it lies in that while UX focuses on usability, interaction design, sound and visual design, CX is also interested in marketing, brand perception, customer service, pricing models, etc. 

Speaking about Service design vs. CX it’s obvious that service design goes even deeper. It is interested in how this end experience is created.

While UX focuses on the design of a single customer touchpoint, service design is about creating a consistent, seamless experience through various touchpoints. It realizes that users don’t interact with these various touchpoints in silos and aligns them to create this end to end experience companies strive to provide.

Establishing the difference between UX and service design is not about trying to find out who is better, it’s about understanding that they both should be practiced simultaneously. When companies think that they offer an outstanding user experience it often leads to what is known as the “delivery gap”. Which is when customers’ expectations of the services they are about to experience exceed what they actually get or what a company is able to offer.  

Bain & Company, after surveying 362 firms, revealed that 80% of them believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, while only 8% of customers agreed. This discrepancy occurred not because those companies were not focusing on their customers’ needs, it’s because they weren’t considering it as a whole. And this where service design steps in to fill the gap.

Image Source: Bain & Company

Filling the delivery gap: how companies do it

As was stated above, service design thinking covers both digital and non-digital experiences, which means it often moves from the digital product into the real world and tries to find a solution there to cover the notorious delivery gap. 

In order to understand how service design shifts from thinking into doing, let’s look at some examples of successfully implementing it.  

A great example of how service design can be applied is the case of a children’s museum in the suburbs of Chicago. The challenge here was to move past the museum wall and increase its awareness and visitor numbers, especially considering the suburban location and limited public transport. Through a mix of research, which included interviews, site visits, competitive analysis, and stakeholder mapping, several concepts emerged that involved moving past the museum walls.  

The idea was to create a pop-up museum in one of the downtown streets that would replicate the exhibit experience at the museum. As a result, the museum was able to attract nearly 2500 visitors during one month only and although it had limited working hours and was open about 20 hours per week. (The case study originally appeared on the Service Design Network website).

From the business perspective, the issues the company usually needs to address come from both digital and non-digital parts. This was the case for one company that planned to move its business model from selling software licenses to offering a subscription. By applying service design thinking and conducting both internal and interviews with customers they were able to anticipate all the main problems this business model shift would entail and actually reveal improvement opportunities. (The case study originally appeared on the Service Design Network website).

 Their initial assumption was that the low subscription cost, compared to the high upfront cost of buying the license would appeal to their customers. But the interviews revealed that not only customers found this model to be more expensive in the long run, but also since the monthly rate would vary based on the usage rate, they found it too unpredictable. For existing customers, another pain point was that the transition to the new plan was highly complex. At the same time, internal interviews showed that after products were launched it was the support’s task to fix any issues that might arise, but since support was not a part of the design process, they couldn’t impact product roadmaps but instead were fixing missing touchpoints post factum. By training them in service design principles and showing how to apply these methods to persona development, blueprinting workshops, the company would be able to not only avoid an increase in cost for the end customers but also increase their profit. By training service teams in service design, they were now able to evaluate the proposed subscription experience and identify points of friction. At the same time, for customers, the license management was simplified and allowed customers to roll their old contracts into new SaaS plans upon expiration and without much effort.  

As a result of the work done customers found it very easy to transition to the new subscription model. And over a short period, the company saw high adoption and satisfaction rates for the new model.  

So what is the unique point of service design and why should a business should be considering implementing it? Unlike experience design, service design takes into consideration not only one part or touchpoint of the customer experience (i.e. an app, a website, etc.) but all the touchpoints across all possible channels. Very often businesses think that redesigning their digital product or designing them in the first place will solve all of the problems their clients might have. While the intention is, by all means good, they forget that this is only a fraction of the journey and that misunderstanding or issues may arise in some other areas, for instance, customer service. While service design tries to take a more holistic approach and anticipate not only possible customers’ issues but also how a given company can improve its internal processes to improve the product or service they offer.  

Interested in Service Design Thinking? Here’s how we can help you introduce service design within your company. 

What is serverless architecture?

Serverless computing or simply serverless is the type of Cloud architecture that doesn’t involve you managing any servers, virtual machines or containers. Despite what the name might suggest, there are still servers, of course, but the task of handling them falls on your cloud infrastructure provider. This allows you to execute the code in a form of functions at automatically provisioned infrastructure and environment. As for the serverless infrastructure providers, there are various options to choose from. Any major Cloud provider offers serverless nowadays: 

• AWS Lambda
• Google Cloud Functions
• Microsoft Azure Functions
• IBM/Apache’s OpenWhisk
• Oracle Cloud Fn

Leading serverless providers

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions provides serverless databases for developers with added benefits like automated scaling, high fault tolerance and high availability. Google as a provider presents a stable environment for building serverless backends, doing real-time data processing for general applications. The platform is also associated with Firebase and lets you automatically run backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features.

Microsoft Azure Functions

Microsoft Azure Functions has a lot in common with AWS Lambda as general purpose serverless infrastructure. It is mainly used for event driven applications providing numerous deployment options to suit the developers’ needs. With the multiple extensions supported for the platform, it is possible to run different workflows and integrations for a database in Azure Functions.

IBM/Apache’s OpenWhisk

IBM/Apache’s OpenWhisk is one of the notable open source serverless cloud platforms around. It is also quite common for event driven applications and impressively scalable for any amount of events. OpenWhisk manages the infrastructure, servers and scaling using Docker containers and can deploy locally and into the cloud. Integrations are fairly easy with popular services using Packages under the OpenWhisk family or part of Apache’s default Catalog.

Oracle Cloud Fn

Oracle Functions, is an open source, fully managed platform for serverless databases. The multi-tenant, highly scalable Functions-as-a-Service provides flexible serverless infrastructure. It also allows developers to automate their app using event types, rules, and actions. Oracle Functions is integrated with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) allowing easy authentication with native Oracle Cloud Infrastructure identity functionality—a plus for developers.

So what is and what isn’t serverless, you might ask. To classify something as truly serverless AWS uses the following 4 characteristics:

• There are no servers to manage – as we’ve established, physical servers, virtual machines, and containers do exist but you neither manage nor have access to them.  

• The price is based on consumption – you only pay for the resources consumed, not capacity, which means you don’t pay for the time your application is idle.

• It scales automatically – as your application grows and meets new demands, it should be able to scale automatically. For example, our team proceeded with Vivino application migration to the cloud which allowed the app to meet the increasing load and grow to more than 36 million users now.  

• Built-in high availability and fault tolerance – availability, recovery or fault tolerance are not your responsibility, as they should be built-in.

Quite frequently it is referenced as “Function as a service” or FaaS. But is only partly correct. Serverless architecture implies that applications either rely on third-party backend services (Backend as a Service or BaaS) or custom code that is run in managed, ephemeral containers (Function as a Service or FaaS). This way, you no longer have to worry about server components. This task falls on your provider.

What are the benefits of serverless architecture?

Apart from the already stated, there’s no server to manage, serverless architecture benefits for business are:

• Reduced cost – on-demand pricing model of serverless means that you pay per function execution which is much more efficient than paying for server fixed price even if it not used. This and the fact that you don’t need to maintain servers 24/7 lower the development cost sufficiently.  

• Low maintenance – from the developers’ perspective, the only thing they need to focus on is application code and business logic, the rest, like server maintenance, scaling configuration, monitoring or runtime environment, fall on the shoulders of the serverless provider.   

• Shorter time-to-market – by removing unnecessary efforts in provisioning required infrastructure for development teams, serverless sufficiently reduces time-to-market. It provides the opportunity to release new functionality quickly by removing roadblocks. Thus making it an ideal solution for PoC or start-ups.  

• Scalability – serverless architecture is easy to scale when needed, which is especially great for an unpredicted load. In cases when a new feature becomes suddenly popular, the serverless environment provides scale-up and scale-down capabilities automatically. So there is no need to worry or prepare upfront. 

• Security and regulatory compliance – serverless providers are responsible for providing a secure infrastructure that is safe, free from hacking and attacks. Additionally, a serverless environment complies with most of the regulatory requirements like GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPPA, etc. Moreover, cloud providers may alert you to out-of-compliance situations, as was the functionality implemented by our team when working on compliance gap analysis and remediation steps for HPE GreenLake, a cloud provider, which manages cloud compliance and cost control in a company’s cloud transformation journey.

• Focus on UX – serverless or not, infrastructure are not the things your customers care about. What they need are great, seamless experience and new features. So this is something you should be focusing on, thankfully serverless architecture allows exactly that.

The downside of serverless computing

But as tempting as serverless architecture might seem, there are also some drawbacks to be aware of:

• Expensive for steady high-load. Unfortunately, serverless is not a silver bullet. When the load increases, serverless offering could become quite expensive. But usually, by this time most of the assumptions are confirmed and you should be quite sure if you want to keep it or not. When you get a steady load, it is time to move to dedicated infrastructure for cost-saving purposes. 

• Vendor lock-in. Once your code is implemented and depends on several managed services, it could be hard to move out from the cloud to on-premise data center because you will need to build alternatives for managed services being used. Even migration from one cloud to another could be painful because of the differences in the API or functionality provided by different vendors.  

• Serverless limitations. Serverless providers set some processing limits. And if you have too many tasks running at the same time, some of them could be blocked from running properly at the requested time. On top of that, serverless is a better fit for short, real-time processes like sending an email rather than long-running processes (like uploading a video) that might be better off on servers.  

• Integration testing is a challenge. Another problem you might come across is an integration testing which is made tougher by serverless abstractions and ephemeral existence. You might also meet some challenges with deployment, versioning, and packaging.

Amazon serverless platforms and their use cases

The most effective way of creating serverless architecture is to pick one of the many cloud platforms that offer numerous capabilities. The main game players on the market today are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. With myriad options to choose from, these platform providers offer a solid foundation for the smooth serverless journey and fully developed serverless systems.  Let’s look into what Amazon, one of the leading serverless providers has to offer and full capabilities of using it to build a web application.

Serverless computing use-cases 

With the introduction of AWS Lambda in 2014, the concept of serverless computing has become widely popular. It was later quickly followed by IBM OpenWhisk/Bluemix, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Cloud Functions. Serverless computing means that the task of application code execution is offloaded to a serverless computing platform for various benefits, such as: not having to worry about hosting runtime, letting the provider manage the security side, easy integration with other services and overall being a cost-effective and scalable solution. This is a winning solution for both a software vendor and business owner, as it allows to focus on code and leaves the execution part to a provider.  

The first and most popular choice here is AWS Lambda. It can be used to build powerful websites and offers numerous benefits, such as faster development, scalability, lower operational cost, and easier operational management.  

But when it comes to serverless time is money. And one of the biggest goals and challenges is avoiding paying for the time when Lambda is doing nothing. The best way to optimize time is to use asynchronous programming. When async is badly executed it creates controller functions that are waiting for AWS services to do something. And what would be a better use of time is to use events or Step Functions to find a better and cheaper solution. Good async can make a huge difference by executing parallelly.  

For additional functions like the ability to throttle users or requests, protecting against Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or providing a caching layer to cache response from Lambda function, API Gateway can be applied, as we did it for in the case with the healthcare AWS cloud-based platform.

For executing simple, time-based tasks like sending out the newsletter on a fixed time, cleaning up the database cache at the regular intervals or for websites running membership accounts with an expiration date, CRON or scheduled jobs can be applied.

Serverless database use-cases

When it comes to serverless computing, a serverless database is not only a prerequisite but also something that requires careful consideration. A rash decision that was not thought out well can cost you extensively either because of ongoing maintenance of the database or to migrate data to another solution. 

The most database cases can either be resolved with SQL or relational databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL) or NoSQL or denormalized (e.g. Dynamo DB, MongoDB, Cassandra). The choice here depends greatly on your priorities. The normalized database offers more flexibility but at the expense of performance. For cases that require high performance and hyper-scalability, NoSQL is a better option.  

For the applications running in AWS, the most popular choices of serverless databases are: DynamoDB or AWS Aurora.

DynamoDB comes with a lot of benefits like automatic scaling in accordance with the application load, pay-per-use pricing model, low amount of maintenance and is generally considered easy to get started with. However, it should also be noted that DynamoDB makes migration to another solution very challenging with a lot of work involved. Its ideal case is an application with set access patterns that won’t change. If, however, you expect some changes in the future, you might need to look into other solutions.

Amazon Aurora is MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database. It performs up to five times faster than MySQL databases and three times faster than PostgreSQL databases. Its on-demand, autoscaling configuration means that the database starts out, scales the capacity per app’s demand and shuts down if not in use. Since it’s fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, you can easily migrate these databases to Aurora serverless option. There’s no need to worry about management, setup, configuration or backups as it is fully managed. AWS Aurora is an ideal, highly secure and cost-effective solution for intermittent, infrequent or unpredictable workloads.

Data processing use-cases

Another popular use case is data processing that comes in handy when there’s a need to process some incoming requests between software components and thus they need to communicate and exchange information. With AWS, there’re three ways to do it:

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a queueing service that enables decoupling and scaling of microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS allows sending, storing and receiving messages at any volume without losing messages. This can be applied for sending out massive amounts of emails, transcoding video files after upload, analyzing user behavior. It works the following way:

A producer sends tasks (messages) to an SQS queue when they are read by consumers in a queued manner.

• Amazon Kinesis offers managed services for streaming data ingestion and processing. It can be used to ingest real-time data. Kinesis responds instantly, by processing and analyzing data as soon as it arrives instead of waiting until all data is collected to begin processing. It can be used to ingest real-time data such as audio, video, application logs or website clickstreams.

• To trigger multiple Lambda functions to process different functionalities, the fan-out technique can be used. A very popular choice here is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). It’s a durable, secure messaging service that allows decoupling microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Using SNS, publishers systems can fan out messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing (including SQS queues). It can also be used to fan out notifications to end users using mobile push, SMS, and email. 

Analytics use-cases 

But building highly scalable web applications is not enough. In order to improve the product itself and get some understanding of user behavior, you need to incorporate analytics. Amazon Serverless services can help with that as well.  

To analyze analytics events and turn data into valuable insights you can use, Amazon Athena can be applied. It helps you analyze unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data and can be used to generate reports or to explore data with business intelligence tools. As a serverless solution, it queries large amounts of data and gets the results in mere seconds and you only have to pay for the data scanned.  

As an out-of-the-box solution, it is integrated with AWS Glue Data Catalog, which allows to create a unified metadata repository across various services, crawl data sources to discover schemas. As a part of AWS serverless solutions Glue natively supports data stored in Amazon Aurora, which means less hassle.  

The range of Amazon serverless platform offering shows that you can easily build and run serverless applications and they completely have your back. And this is just one provider, you can pick any other of the five leading market players and discover their equivalent offering.  

Debating whether serverless architecture is what you really need? Contact us and our technology consultant will help you to make the right decision on cloud solutions for your product whether you need it for building a cloud-native application from scratch or for your legacy app modernization.