Director Message
Welcome to our third newsletter for 2020!
Efforts to find a COVID-19 vaccine are showing positive progress. The world, while still needing to remain vigilant, has begun to show signs of resuming some sort of normal business activity. Many countries are having some success in controlling the spread of COVID-19, and we hope to see more good news in the last months of 2020.
A good news story is from our Featured Client for this edition. Branden Dekenah and Tim de Boer from Interfuze have had significant success in developing new strategies. It’s always great to hear from clients who have managed to create success in their projects, and even better when it’s built on leveraging the services Mitrais provides.
In this issue we are evaluating four different test automation tools, and we share the results in this edition’s White Paper. We applied a weighting scheme which is currently relevant for Mitrais, and we hope this evaluation assists you in choosing the best test automation tool for your own unique requirements.
In this edition’s Featured Employee article, we introduce one of our Engagement Managers, Prins Carl Santoso. A little career change brought him a world of opportunities, and we are happy to have him as part of our trusted family in Mitrais.
Interfuze Consulting and The Secret Sauce of Blended Agile Development
With more than 50 years combined experience as consultants working with clients throughout the world to orchestrate software solutions, Branden Dekenah and Tim de Boer realised that something was missing. In the race to capitalise on the hype and sales surrounding a new breed of SaaS solutions, consultancies were increasingly reverting to “solutions-based” strategies rather than starting from the perspective of understanding a client’s problems, and crafting a solution from there.
So, it was a natural extension for them to create a consulting organisation that worked in the way that they would like if they were the client. In early 2019, Interfuze Consulting was created to fill that niche. Today Interfuze has enjoyed steady growth and is continuing to grow organically with Branden as Managing Director and Tim as Director.
With his long experience as a solutions architect, development manager and technical consultant, Tim has had exposure to many software development methodologies and techniques. In around 2007, as development manager with a Perth geoscience company developing advanced interpretation software, he had his first experience of blending an in-house development team with remote team members from an offshore provider and was immediately impressed with the results. “It was certainly not easy at first” Tim says, “but the results came, and it turned into a long-term arrangement”.
Later, with Empired, Tim implemented a similar solution and was introduced to Mitrais by a colleague as a source of the quality remote developers for his team that he was looking for. Visiting the Bali headquarters, he was impressed with the speed with which he could interview and assess candidates, the resulting quality of the team and how well they integrated into his local team.
So, when he came to develop strategies for his Interfuze Consulting clients, it was no surprise who he approached for the blended Agile team he required. His client set Interfuze quite an aggressive challenge, he says – “to accelerate the delivery of their cloud product’s internationalization from six months to six weeks!”. And it worked! “Key to hitting that target was a swift ramp up of the productivity of our Mitrais nearshore delivery partners” he says.
Tim has written a great series of blog posts on his “secret sauce” in leveraging maximum performance from his blended Agile team, and it boils down to fully utilising today’s best practices and tools including DevOps, Cloud tools, and collaboration methods. And while every project potentially has its own set of challenges and obstacles, Tim finds that his “secret sauce” is a great starting point.
At its heart, a great deal of it is common sense. “It’s no secret that open and reliable communications is key to offshoring, and it’s surprising how small the barriers need to be to tear that all down” says Tim. “I can honestly say that after a few minor hiccups, not I, or anyone I know on both teams, was ever left wanting for comms. And the number of independent connections being made between onshore and nearshore team members was very encouraging”.
It’s always great to hear from clients who have managed to create success in their projects, and even better when it’s built on leveraging the services Mitrais provides. As Tim says, “For as long as Mitrais continues to be able to provide the quality developers that I am looking for in such a timely manner, we are expecting the long-term relationship to continue”. At Mitrais, we certainly look forward to continuing to work successfully with Tim, Branden and Interfuze in the long term.
Testing Automation Tools Comparison 2020
This White Paper was produced originally to evaluate Ranorex, Katalon Studio, Mabl, and TestCafe.
The evaluation gives points to selected criteria where the weight of each criteria is determined by the importance of that criteria. It is designed to assist our clients in choosing the correct test automation tool for their own unique requirements.
This White Paper updates the previous Mitrais’ evaluation of testing automation tools from our Quarter 3 2018 newsletter. Download and get our complete White Paper here.
Prins Carl Santoso – A False Start and a Slam Dunk!
How many of us think we have settled on our career early on, only to find our passion later?
This is how the journey has been for this month’s Featured Staff Member, Prins. Born and educated in Bogor, West Java, a city located about 60km south of the capital Jakarta, Prins was obsessed with basketball throughout school (as were many of his friends).
Once he moved to Senior High School, Prins got his first taste of programming, learning Visual Basic and spending time in the computer lab. He found the process of creating simple applications fascinating, and a nice contrast to his basketball.
While he considered himself as having no real IT background at all, his school’s participation in an Academic Olympics meant that they needed to compete in an event called “Komputer”. Prins was chosen to represent in this event, but since the event mandated Pascal as the language to be used, he found himself in a difficult position. Could he learn Pascal, a language he had never used, in just 1 month? He did – and the rest is history.
Like many students, Prins had to accept that he would need to commute back and forth to Jakarta for University. He enrolled in a double degree in Mathematics and Information Technology at Bina Nusantara University (BINUS). And like many students, Prins needed to work during his studies to make ends meet. He secured a job in the university’s IT Division while studying, and although this made his average workday 14 hours long, it did help financially and gained him experience in the IT industry as a programmer. Prins was sure that programming and application development was where his future lay.
He steadily progressed from Programmer to Senior Programmer, Systems Analyst and, eventually, Systems Architect. Clearly, he had a talent for IT and was enjoying seeing business IT from a wider perspective. After graduation, he moved to a role of Business Analyst with a manufacturing company. As luck would have it, soon after he joined, the company implemented SAP as their ERP solution. Prins was deeply involved with the business decisions around the implementation and analysing the business costs and benefits associated with it. He had a lightbulb moment! Prins realised that his passion was not really for programming (although he had demonstrated talent and enjoyed it), but for the management of businesses to maximise productivity and profitability through the effective and efficient use of IT.
Then he learned of Mitrais. As a multinational company involved with services and product development (particularly in the medical space), Mitrais was very interesting to Prins. Its good reputation in Indonesia and the great opportunity it presented for him to continue to develop his skills in business utilisation of IT made it a very attractive prospect.
When Prins joined Mitrais, he saw the immediate challenge as coming up to speed with the Medical Software domain, and he relished it. But Mitrais opened so many more doors for him. He had previously had experience in Education and Manufacturing verticals, and now added Medical as another area of his expertise.
Now, 4 years after joining, Prins still sees a world of opportunities with Mitrais. “I love to challenge myself” he says, “and I hope that working with a variety of clients here will allow me to gain experience and expertise in still other business types. I am keen to contribute more to Mitrais and its clients and add even more value. Perhaps something in the Automotive domain would be really interesting if the chance presents itself!”. And Prins is making that happen, having recently gained international qualifications as a Professional Scrum Master I and Professional Scrum Product Owner I!
So, even if he started on an Application Development path, Prins eventually scored a slam-dunk and found his real passion. As one of our talented Engagement Managers, we think Prins’s future looks bright with Mitrais, and we are happy to have him as part of our trusted family.
