Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum. (16)

Recently, we organised our first ever Infomentum quiz night. We’ve got a sociable office made up of 16 nationalities and lively personalities, and we try to have regular events to get different teams working together. Nothing says inter-departmental collaboration like a competitive quiz!

If you read my last blog post on May's MuleSoft Summit, you'll remember that I told you I got a sneak peek at MuleSoft's roadmap.

Well, that functionality has now been released.

On July 29th, MuleSoft's Crowd release went live. It seemed like a long wait, but it was finally time to put my hands on the new Anypoint Exchange 2.0 and the completely new component, Design Center. Now that I've had a few days to take a look around at all of the new functionality, I'm rounding up my highlights below. 

We are celebrating a decade in business!

Infomentum has celebrated its 10th anniversary. Starting life as technology implementation experts in Oracle WebCenter portfolio, the business has experienced rapid growth over the years which has seen its capabilities expand.

Now in its tenth year, we offer our customers a wide range of services; from digital acceleration consulting, to technology implementation in the areas of content and process, data and analytics and customer experience, to full managed services and hosting. The business now offers expertise in best-of-breed technologies from Oracle, Mulesoft, Amazon, Adobe and more.

Kicking off our new blog series, ‘A Day in the Life of…’ our summer interns, computer science students Pratik Jadhav and Hasan Rafiq, reveal a behind-the-scenes glimpse of an intern’s typical day.

I chose to study computer science because…

Pratik: My dad is in the IT business so it’s something I’ve been interested in from a young age. I love technology and I wanted to understand how everything works, and how to develop everything.

Hasan: Other members of my family are in IT so I always knew about it. At first, I was going to go into dentistry, but I tried it out and I couldn’t see myself looking into other people’s mouths for the rest of my life! So I knew then that I wanted to go into computer science.

The old way

I'm going to let you in on a secret. I learnt my trade in a traditional software testing consultancy - I'm talking a waterfall approach to test planning, test case definition and test scripting. Over the last 5 years at Infomentum, I've evolved and have worked hard to optimise Infomentum's testing practices to suit our agile development environment. 

Recently, I was one of the lucky few that were handpicked to attend Oracle's partner training on Intelligent Bot in London - and that meant I got hands-on experience with the product and witnessed its glory in action! The product is called Intelligent Bot and it would be available as part of the Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) suite as it complements other features of that product - not to mention that it fits the product the most. The aim is to provide an easy way to create Chatbot applications in simple steps, and provide options for Intent Recognition - i.e. understanding what the Chatbot's end user means - and custom entities to be able to take actions and drive the conversation towards whatever developers see fit.

Wait: you need to read part 1 and part 2 first!

The fun side of cultural change

You’ll remember that last week I discussed the crucial need for a cultural change in how we dealt with time logging. After the CX team’s thorough research, we were ready to take the findings – and our ideas – to our board of directors. 

Hint: you'll need to read part 1 first for this post to make sense.

Phase 2: Imagine

The CX team got together to discuss the problems and carry out an internal ideation workshop to tackle them. We knew that we had 3 key tasks:

• Improve people’s knowledge of why time logging is important
• Create a culture of time logging as a habit; and
• Make the systems they needed to use simpler and clearer while having less of them!

It had been coming for a long time…

At the end of every month, developers scrambled to complete their timesheets, while the operations team were breathing down their necks, threatening them with sticks to get it done - and done right. The developers were left wondering why operations wanted their time logs so desperately. Surely they already knew what they had been working on? The operations team were scratching their heads as to why the developers didn’t do it; they had been reminded at the end of every month like clockwork, yet every month the same story. It was hugely frustrating for both sides, and was approaching boiling point. As soon as the Customer Experience team had a break between projects, we knew this was a top internal issue that had to be solved.

I’ve wanted to write something about Infomentum's scrum board since its inception in late 2012. Now seemed as good a time as any to share the story...

During an end of sprint retrospective, one of our developers Jakub said “I'm bored of the board.” That didn’t surprise me.