By Deepak Anupalli,
VP of Engineering, WaveMaker
COVID-19 has disrupted life in many ways, bringing new challenges as well as opportunities for everyone to learn and innovate new ways of coping up with this crisis. Working from home is never easy, amidst daily chores, fetching essentials, keeping the kids occupied etc. staying on top of a product release is an unprecedented task.
A major product update was planned to go out to customers on April 1st week and we were hit by COVID lockdown, from March 18th our teams started working from home. It is a very humbling and commendable effort by the team to come forward to make the release happen. WaveMaker 10.4 is released on April 20th, a big Kudos to WaveMaker Team !
Amidst the crisis and lockdown, being a software product organization the best way we can help the world is to create better software. In these times, having a clear purpose for our team to achieve something better, learn new things, be closer to one another and keep our morale high is very important. There is nothing better than to work as a team to accomplish more and better.
1. Better collaboration using the right tools.
Collaborating with a large distributed team is very tough, unless we have the right tools to track the tasks, their progress and information needed for the team members at the right time. Understanding where the team is stuck and changing course, making right decisions is the most important job for the product leads. Collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean getting onto a video call for everything and going on for hours, effective communication is the most important aspect of collaboration.
2. Over communicate and share everything with the team.
Team learned to document every detail, summary of the discussions, notes from brainstorming sessions, videos, presentations etc. Having an internal collaboration platform, like Groupe.io helped team members to do this effectively and also engage every member in conversations. Conversations are very crucial as they capture the decisions made in developing the features, which improved collaboration across development, testing & devops teams.
3. Bring the team together, by setting a clear routine
Daily morning stand ups to discuss the priorities for the day and deliverables from each individual. It is very important to be empathetic to each one and understand one another’s personal situation amidst the crisis, alongside working together to achieve the objective.
4. Enabled for remote working
Leaving aside the productivity and collaboration tools like G-suite, JIRA, Groupe.io, WaveMaker started the journey with cloud infrastructure, embracing AWS and container-based delivery model, since the inception. Having all the platform infrastructure and deployment environments on the cloud, enabled us to connect and deliver easily.
5. Most importantly, fun!
Of course, there are Yoga sessions, virtual birthday celebrations, games, and fun!
Check out all the new features in the 10.4 release here
