Our main focus on custom web application, website and browser extension development. Since 2005 abz.agency® has been working in the area of web development and work with clients from all around the globe. As a global outsourcing provider we have 95+ guys work in 8 offices of the company (2 offices in Tallinn, Estonia; 5 offices in Kyiv, Ukraine; 1 office in Vilnius, Lithuania).
Our guys have expertise in more than 30 fields of activities: cosmetology, online courses, oil and gas trade, touristic business, restaurant business, dentistry, landing pages, coupon and discount sites, browser extensions and countless data parsers and scrapers, SaaS, StartUp, e-Commerce, CRM/ ERP, education, show jumping, hotel, MLM and many others. In 2013 - 2014 we made two own StartUps.
We already have a spacious office space in Kyiv, where we plan to start renovations in the spring. The goal is to open it by the end of spring and expand our operations. Additionally, it’s likely that we’ll need to expand the office in Tallinn, because there we have only one empty desk left. We also have plans to grow our sales department and expand our expertise in non-web technology stacks like C++ development, DevOps, etc. There’s a lot on our plate for this year, and we will continue to do our best for our clients.
We continued working during blackouts with a generator and a Starlink. This year, despite all circumstances our team expanded to over 75 members and we opened two more offices in Kyiv. We also revamped our internal financial and accounting system, and introduced an office manager lead position. We nurtured the growth of two QA engineers into project managers and initiated the process of reopening of our sales department.
On the technology side we made our first steps into C++ development and extended our expertise in the DevOps field. CI/CD of all our projects was standardized and migrated to Bitbucket pipelines.
Expansion
We have registered a legal entity (LLC) in the EU and also opened our first office outside of Ukraine – in Tallinn, Estonia (T1). Our HR department is working now to fill all the desks in this office, with either local candidates or those who are willing to relocate.
Office
We also opened a 3rd office in Kyiv (K3), like our other 2 Kyiv offices has loft style too – just concrete without any paint or decoration, but lighting and ventilation are done on a very good level, with a spacious kitchen and meeting room. Due to the current situation in the country we had to change some priorities while looking for a new office space. Office building, where K3 is located, has stable electricity and heating, even during outages in other parts of Kyiv.
Both K1 and K2 offices were equipped with backup energy supply systems (UPS/PPS from EcoFlow and a gasoline power generator) and backup internet providers (optic fiber connected directly to ISP servers and Starlink devices) to allow all guys located in these offices to continue working during power outages.
Updating the hardware
During this year we also bought more than 20 Apple MacBook PROs based on Apple Silicon chips and also replaced batteries in our remaining Intel based MacBooks.
Technologies
Despite all the obstacles we continued adopting new technologies and extending our knowledge in different areas, as well as working on internal standards. We adopted Terraform and Kubernetes in yet another project, performed cost optimization on GCP and Heroku, introduced internal coding standards for Laravel projects, learned how to effectively handle huge traffic spikes (caused by our project being showcased in news on TV), etc.
Office
Currently we have 3 offices in 2 Ukrainian cities. This year our main office moved into a new office space. We redesigned it ourselves in the loft style with an openspace area, 2 meeting rooms, break room, big kitchen/cantine, etc.
Equipment upgrade
During the year, new equipment was purchased: new 4K monitors, new MacBook PRO based on M1. QA department equipment has been updated. Other accessory devices like headsets, keyboards, etc. necessary for the comfortable work were also purchased.
Sales Department
First 2 quarters were quite chaotic for our sales department due to COVID related uncertainty and clients cutting budgets. However, in 3rd and 4th quarter we adapted to the situation and stabilised our sales funnel.
HR and Trainee
In August we had 8 guys having on-boarding/traineeship at the same time. This is first time when we had so many newcomers at once but we managed it well and are ready to do it again in the coming years.
We updated our traineeship program for frontend and backend developers, now it takes 2 months and includes: learning and applying in practice company policies/regulations, Learning how to work in the team with other guys (trainee team consists of PM, QA and a mentor), learning and applying in practice our standard development technologies that are used on each project in our company.
Our traineeship program for QA engineers was also updated and also this year we developed a traineeship program for React Native Application Developer.
Technologies
This is the second year since we started to use React Native for mobile apps development and now we have a traineeship program for this technology.
We adopted many new technologies this year: GCP (GKE and different hosted services), RabbitMQ, InfluxDB, Harbor, ArgoCD, Github Actions, Bing API, MapBox API, Figma, etc.
From March till July, 4 company guys had to sit on fully paid benches (due to lack of workload caused by the global lockdown). During that downtime, they were working on self-development and acquiring new skills and competencies. But due to the wide-scale and active work with our clients, all the other guys in the company maintained a full workload.
In July, we fully recovered our previous workload and by the end of the year we were maintaining our standard workload of all the guys at 90-120%.
Automatic germicidal lamps were installed in all of our offices in every room. The lamps are turned on twice a day for 15 minutes at noon and for 30 minutes and in the evening. Quarantine measures and precautions were taken all across the company.
Despite all of our efforts, in October in one office and in November in another one several guys were tested positive for Covid-19. In both cases, the company covered the tests for all guys in the corresponding office and took all recommended measures: fully disinfecting all the premises, working from home for 2 weeks, etc. Unfortunately, not all of our clients accepted the delays associated with Covid-19 testing, quarantine, and setting up full scale remote work
Sales Department
We have expanded our sales team up to 6 guys so that more customers have the opportunity to experience our systematic, streamlined and transparent approach to communication and software development.
Implemented KPIs for sales staff.
Implemented CRM and SIP telephony into our sales department workflow. Developed detailed work regulations for the sales department which helps us guarantee quality and consistency of client experience on all the stages of our communication.
Improvements in personal development processes
We created a set of internal regulations for development, QA and project management activities and every quarter all the guys take an assessment on the knowledge of all the relevant regulations.
We significantly extended regulations and best practices on QA. We introduced new types of testing: UX testing, Critical Path testing, Integration testing in addition to ones that were previously used including: E2E tests, Smoke tests, Regression tests, Positive and Negative functional testing.
The company has completely moved to using Docker for local development and partially on dev/prod servers. CI/CD has been implemented on most projects using Bitbucket pipelines.
Guys Personal Development
Implemented an IDP (Individual Development Plan) for each guy. Guys should spend at least 5‑7 hours a week to acquire new knowledge and competencies.
Each guy of the company should now read 8-12 books on the development of soft and hard skills each year which comes out to one book every month on average. The guys read a little bit of a book every day and send text reports with analysis of what they had read with recommendations on how to implement this information in their work, including updates to the corresponding internal regulations to make our work even more efficient.
The company already had a large library of electronic and audio books. This year we also expanded buying hard copies for all of the offices, so we have a physical library in each office.
Updating the hardware
We replaced most of the monitors with native 4K resolution. We have partially renewed our equipment fleet by purchasing MacBooks Pro 2013 and a MacBooks Pro 2016.
Two years ago, we introduced a mandatory 2-month internship for new front-end and back-end developers. During 2019, we were actively updating assignments, increasing the effectiveness of the internships. This provides an unprecedented opportunity to introduce the work environment to the new guys. Internship assignments involve working with project manager, QA specialist and getting code reviews. New guy quickly learns the company's way of working and regulations and how to collaborate within a cross-functional team. Another major goal of the internship period is to learn our key technologies, libraries, frameworks, etc. that allow him/her to be efficient and productive on any of our projects from day one.
This year a 2-month internship course for QA specialists was developed. This makes it possible to quickly introduce new guys to working with checklist templates, test cases and company regulations for QA process used on all our projects.
In addition, the so-called homework assignments were introduced for the current guys as an opportunity to grow. These assignments are updated with new best practices and technologies throughout the year.
In addition to on-boarding process improvements for new guys during this year we have adopted new technologies such as AWS EKS, AWS SQS, AWS SES, VNC, Puppeteer, Next.js/Nuxt.js/Nest.js, prerender.cloud, etc.
We assessed how every team works on their projects: estimates, time tracking, collaboration between developers and QA, workflow for ad‑hoc changes and critical bugs, etc. We tried to understand what approach is currently used in typical situations by different teams and selected the best one. As a result we have now a process framework – set of rules and best practices for project managers and lead developers. Of course we didn’t invent everything from scratch – a lot of best practices in our framework are based on scrum and lean development methodologies.
Since we started applying this framework in every team overall team performance has significantly improved and we achieved accurate estimates and timely quality delivery on multiple projects.
While analyzing our development processes we also reviewed and optimized QA workflow and tools used on different project. We introduced common standards and testing workflow for different types of tasks. After reviewing our QA tools we have reconsidered our templates for checklists, test cases and smoke/regression test plans. We also started working on automating QA routines and as a first step monkey test were introduced on multiple projects and a couple of our small projects (browser extensions) were covered with Selenium acceptance tests.
In addition to processes and tools review during this year we have adopted new technologies such as Adobe XD for wireframing, Docker, Kubernetes, Cloudflare workers, Vue.js framework, a bunch of AWS services like Lambda or API Gateway, etc. A couple of our projects are now deployed using CI/CD.
Our team has grown to 24 people in total. In addition to expanding our IT team we hired a full-time English teacher and created a sales department. We continued updating our equipment (new 2017 Macbook Pros, Dell 2K monitors, accessories, etc.).
During this year we started using new technologies such as React.js, Angular.js 4&5, etc.
In addition, we began using new communication channels, such as Zeplin, Jira, Slack, Trello.
We finished our rebranding. We invested a lot in the professional development of our team: organised English classes twice a week, while providing our staff with annual subscriptions on a couple of websites that provided online courses like Coursera,and made sure they attended a couple of IT conferences.
We also established a mentorship culture inside the company. Our lead backend developer was providing mentorship to frontend developers who wanted to learn NodeJS. Last but not least, we re-launched our website with a fresh and modern design and upgraded our technical equipments.
It’s a service which allows users to create a mosaic photo collage from their photos, either by uploading them from a local PC or from any of 10 supported social networks. Due to operations and customer support complexities, in December 2015 we sold this service. However, we’re still in charge of its maintenance and new feature development.
Also in the course of this year, we adopted modern technologies like Laravel 5.1 and Symfony 2.7 PHP frameworks, Angular Material Design technology, CloudFront CDN, while switching to frontend deployment pipeline with Gulp, etc.
Which was a call to simplify collaboration between clients and designers during work on the design of mockups. This SaaS solution allowed designers to organise mockups in the proper order with automatic numbering and just share a link to a specific design mockup with their clients. Clients could use any type of devices to view the shared link: desktop, tablet or mobile. Design mockups viewer was optimised for each type of device.
Also this year, we adopted modern technologies like Laravel 4.2 and Yii 2 PHP frameworks, ExpressJS javascript framework, new generation of iOS SDK and deployed our first website to Amazon AWS.
It allowed us to win another tender, this time it was a web-based wizard which was in the form of "user call guide" which helped in choosing the right product from a catalog with 75000 products like electric cables, different switches, cases, etc.
Also, this year we started using google documents and mockflow in our daily work. We signed our first contracts with clients from different states: Germany, Israel, the UK and the USA
Our clients’ websites moved to the top 1-5 positions for the target keywords which increased their user base and improved sales numbers.
It allowed us to develop a more user friendly UI for our client’s websites.
This led to a long term partnership which resulted in two websites, a tournament management system, a PC video-game, a photo selling module, a webcam operation system and much more.
We developed a management system for a multi-level-marketing (MLM) business, which included an accounting system, a financial reporting system, a unique module for MLM and a whole lot more. By 2009, we had implemented 13 MLM management systems for different companies from CIS countries. During this period we also designed and developed numerous smaller websites for different fields of businesses.
