How Nexapp delivers more value, faster.

At Nexapp, we have an engineering culture that stands out for its use of modern practices and the commitment of the entire team to apply them on a daily basis. But what is an engineering culture, and how is it defined at Nexapp? The best people to talk about this are our Engineering Managers, Martin Nadeau, Bruno Gagnon-Adam and Philippe Lavoie, and our VP Engineering, Alexandre Walsh. Here's what they had to say on the subject.

What's an engineering culture?

A culture is defined by a group of individuals who share the same values, principles and beliefs, and who live them together on a daily basis. We can, of course, speak of a country's culture or a company's culture.

Engineering culture is the same thing, but more specific to software development. It's the set of shared beliefs and values that will have a subsequent impact on the way members of the organization make decisions or take actions concerning software development.

"Software development is much more than code. Code is simply the result of all the processes, tools, techniques, philosophies and approaches that together make up an engineering discipline."

What defines Nexapp's engineering culture

For a long time at Nexapp, the key word in our engineering culture was "quality". Over the years, we've come to realize that quality can be interpreted in many different ways. For us, quality means being flexible, agile and lean. In other words, it has to be easy to make changes, so we apply practices along these lines, and rather than aiming for perfection, we iterate towards our goal, adapting along the way.

Why is software engineering a complex field? Not least because there are more unknowns than knowns. We don't know the right solution in advance, and we can't guarantee that our efforts will automatically work. So we need to favor an approach based on the scientific method (e.g. hypothesis-driven development), i.e. we pose a hypothesis, carry out an experiment, then validate what we've done. That's why we're constantly striving to speed up the experimentation loop so that it's as short as possible. Knowing that development teams who experiment get it wrong on average 66% of the time, it's better to iterate with small hypotheses.

"Software development is always an exercise of discovery and learning. At Nexapp, we want to learn as quickly as possible."

Our aim is to deliver something quickly to the customer that he can test and use at a reasonable cost, and which will then evolve iteratively. In other words, we can add and modify elements according to what we discover during development.

Minimizing the time between deliverables through small iterations allows us to gather feedback as quickly as possible and make sure we're on track, one step at a time. It also allows us to deliver value ideally every day, if not several times a day. At Nexapp, we strive to use modern approaches such as continuous delivery and continuous discovery.

Our engineering culture and values

At Nexapp, building the right product is our first priority. To get there, we need to know how to work better to be more efficient, so we're constantly introspecting to improve. Here are the shared values that fuel our engineering culture.

Cooperation

We place great emphasis on cooperation within our teams, so that all disciplines can help solve problems with their respective expertise, while promoting collective productivity. We want to create a sense of community, reduce discomfort when problems arise and make support more accessible. It's also what enables us to have a good feedback culture, whether within the teams, the company or with our customers.

It's important for Nexapp to have happy, committed teams. That's why we don't hesitate to celebrate successes and encourage initiatives.

Involvement

In our various projects, we allow employees to experiment and we give ourselves the right to make mistakes. We advocate creativity over convenience! People feel more autonomous in their work, they can give their best, and this allows us to maximize continuous learning. Everyone is encouraged to seek out information rather than take it for granted, so that they have more clarity, which reduces stress by making deliveries easier.

By involving everyone and enabling teams to be innovative, Nexapp is able to guarantee the success of its customers' projects.

Professionalism

Professionalism goes without saying when you work in a service company, but we put our own Nexapp sauce on it so that we always put thinking before judging, and always question before assuming. We don't hesitate to question the status quo, while making iterative progress. What's more, since in software development we're often called upon to work on systems that already exist, we make a point of respecting that the people who came before us did the best they could in the context they had.

Trust

We've built a climate of trust within the organization that allows our experts in product strategy, software development andUX/UI design to be best placed to make the best decisions in the context. In fact, our engineering culture brings greater cohesion, trust and transparency to the team, making us more efficient and motivated!

Adding value to projects

In addition to happy, committed teams, Nexapp's engineering culture brings a number of other benefits to projects. First and foremost, there's a significant reduction in risk for the customer. As deliveries are more frequent, they are less painful and the return on investment (ROI) is maximized. Testing is simpler and more frequent, so the cost of changes is lower and time-to-market (T2M) is much faster. The more you can work on small increments, validate them quickly, get feedback often, then improve them continuously, the faster you bring value to the customer (aka, a better, higher-quality product)!

"At Nexapp, we move away from the traditional supplier-customer relationship. We're a partner who works collaboratively towards the completion of a project."

In addition to providing a high-performance team, we work with our customers to improve delivery performance. In fact, we help our customers to accelerate the delivery approach, to deliver more functionality, faster, more frequently and with higher quality. All this to generate greater user engagement and optimize the company's investment.

Inspirations behind our engineering culture

• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Agile Manifesto
• Continuous Delivery
• Modern Software Engineering
• Software Craftsmanship
• Lean Manufacturing
• State of DevOps et DevOps Reasearch and Assesment (DORA)