We are sure that the way to successfully accomplished project passes though a successful team.
Our experiences shows that the team composed of junior and senior specialists makes the tasks faster and with better quality then the group of high-qualified specialist s from different teams. This fact is easily explained by adaptation inside the team when the employees are on the same wave.
We organized of the production department by optimizing it for the best ratio of capacity/performance/quality. We have finally evolved to a composite organization that in our case provides the best balance between project-oriented and functional organizations, for example:
- Projects with mixed technologies may be performed in cooperation by teams from several departments
- We have many people skilled in two or more technologies (primary and supplementary), for example Java and .NET
- Though the rotation happens not very often, people may also move between departments
- Long-term projects may be reorganized into separate ODC
Where our staff comes from
Major source of junior staff are Novosibirsk State University and Novosibirsk Technical University graduates with solid mathematical and physics background. NSU is famous for organizing mathematics and physics competitions among pupils throughout Siberia and neighboring countries (Kazakhstan) to attract the most promising students.
Senior staff is mostly grown internally and also comes from other companies. One of the company’s strategic goals is to be the leader on the local labor market. We are proud that Fortess brand is well known and prestigious. Our vacancies are quite attractive for both students and experienced people and our ramp-up capabilities are high.
We have elaborated quite strict but effective procedure for candidates selection:
1) After successful pass of interview and tests a new hired employee goes through Assessment center. This allows us to quickly and accurately evaluate people against company values: technical skills, ability to effectively solve technical problems, responsibility, accuracy, ability to learn, etc. Company values appeared as result of collaborative work to define our needs to be efficient and successful on the market.
2) During a trial period people go through training courses and finally start working in the real projects
3) On quarterly basis department manager prepares quarterly personal training plans: trainings, readings, certification exams, courses of English, seminars, research tasks, etc; and get employees feedback on performance reviews meetings
Testing team
Majority of testers are certificated by well-respected authorities (ISTQB: International Software Testing Qualifications Board).
By their technical background, we spit the team up into two groups:
1) former or future software engineers who know on the inside software and its possible bottlenecks
2) pure testers that acting as a consumers check usability in the best way
