How did it start?
One of our clients is a company from England whose business is manufacturing and selling school and sports clothing. Their business was founded more than 10 years ago, when Adam (the current CEO of LEOCODE) and Maciej (his friend and a current software engineer at LEOCODE) met the IT Director and they started their software development endeavour. After a while, Adam and Maciej were asked to build a tech team in Poland that could help the company further develop an e-commerce system and scale the tech team.
The challenge
There were many challenges along the way. We started by creating a company management system from scratch based on the system they had been using. One of the biggest challenges was the integration with the warehouse management system. Nevertheless, it was a successful implementation. There were many workarounds and custom ideas regarding how to transfer data from one system to another. We also carried out a code review which resulted in us implementing good software development practices in Ruby on Rails and Javascript. Currently, we need to refactor some parts of the code to speed up the development and to make its maintenance easier.
Team cooperation between the UK and PL
Our team is responsible for two different webshops and back office setups. There are two developers and an architect on the client's side, three developers and two QAs on our side (one manual tester and one writing test automation). We work in SCRUM, we have daily stand ups, retrospections and so on.
Long-term cooperation - the outcome and benefits
From the client’s point of view the system is crucial to their operations and has to be very stable and secure. It gives them a competitive advantage in the UK market. We implemented a complete fashion e-commerce system from scratch.
Conclusions
- The biggest asset for the clients are our skilled software developers who have experience in many industries and can apply useful solutions to the platform.
- The work can be done remotely from Poland as well as from the UK if it is managed properly (most staff work remotely).
- Developing and maintaining an e-commerce system requires a lot of efficient solutions, security and scalability - especially if this is one of the biggest revenue channels for the company.