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Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering

We are very proud of our colleagues, who are constantly learning and working on themselves. It is thanks to them that we have had many successful projects. For this reason, we would like to present you a certificate that our colleagues have completed – Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering. Possessing an IREB-certification has a main impact for the German, Austrian and Swiss market – for xitee it is a big advantage to have Analysts with this certification!

About the certificate

The Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering (CPRE) is a personal certificate which is suitable for people working in Requirements Engineering, Business Analysis and Testing. This certificate will improve their professional knowledge. Only an independent training providers teach the contents. The certificate does not expire, it has lifetime validity.

Who issues the certification?

The scheme of the certificate is developed by the IREB. IREB, the International Requirements Engineering Board, a non-profit organization, is the provider of the CPRE certification scheme. The board consists of leading RE representatives, who come from science, research, industry and consulting.

What does one of our team members say about the certification?

“In the field of business analysis this is not the only type of certification, there is also the BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) certification which I also have got, but with an IREB certificate we are able to compete on the German market. With IREB I have improved my skill how to model processes using UML.”

And for the ones, who don’t know what an UML-diagram can look like, there is one for an ATM activity case:

We thank all our colleagues and congratulate them once again on possessing this type of a certificate!

UX/UI design

UX stands for “user experience”. It focuses on the users and their interaction with the product. The goal of UX design at xitee is to give our clients and developers a realistic view of the solution before it is actually created. This gives them a better idea and understanding of the look and feel, interactions, features, accessibility on different devices and platforms, and functionality of the software. This can ultimately save significant financial resources.

UI design is more specifically concerned with the “user interface”, which is the graphical layout of the solution. This includes screen layouts, transitions, interface animations and every single micro-interaction. It also includes colours, buttons that users click on, texts, images, sliders, text entry fields and all other items that the user interacts with.

Our approach:

We follow a user-oriented approach to create highly functional and affordable products for our customers. In the first phase, we learn and get to know the customer’s business requirements. Specifically, this means understanding the context in which users may use the solution. In the second phase, we create the design. The outputs are then evaluated based on user requirements. We perform these phases in iterations until the evaluation results are satisfactory. The last phase is then the implementation of the final designs.

The benefits of good UX/UI design lead to:

reduction of development costs
increase the quality of the solution (by creating user journeys and incorporating customer feedback)
a realistic idea of the final product
increase customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty
building the customer’s brand (by incorporating the company’s design and logo)
higher Google search engine rankings (because customers have longer interaction with a UX-optimised website)

xitee offers:

User journeys: a user journey is a visualisation of the process a person goes through to accomplish an intended task. It is usually presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts with a product. Our goal is to study your users, understand their behavior, and design a user journey that allows users to achieve their desired tasks with minimal effort.
Wireframes: wireframes represent the path users take when interacting with a website or application, including user interface elements such as buttons or images.
Mockups: mockups are the last preview of the final version of the product, allowing clients or users to get to know the overall design of the product before its development.
Prototypes: prototypes are interactive mockups – final versions of the product that are clickable and allow you to test the main way the product interacts, also before its actual development.
Post-launch metrics analysis: metrics are signals that show whether our UX strategy is working. Using metrics is the key to tracking changes over time. We can help you set up and use analytics tools like Google analytics or Piwik.

Online face-to-face consulting platform enabling online deal-closing

Since the pandemic situation of Covid-19, digitalisation has become more important. Companies are now facing the questions such as how to provide personalised and confidential advice online? How to close a valid contract directly during an online meeting? What does the customer really expect during an online advice session?

Even before the pandemic, there was already a large number of online services, but only 34% of customers really preferred these services. Today, twice as many customers prefer them than before the pandemic. Digital interaction with customers has also increased dramatically. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the older or younger generation, ultimately everyone has been in a certain way forced into digital change. Companies are of course aware of this trend and know that they have to adapt to customer expectations.

However, it is important to mention that while on the one hand the use of online services is increasing, on the other hand consumers prefer human interaction more than before. Today, 83% of consumers prefer human contact, which is a higher percentage than before Covid-19. Moreover, customers prefer online services only in situations involving less important matters. If they need advice on complex decisions they seek face-to-face meetings.

For these reasons, there is a need to combine services offered online and face-to-face contact. Switch from purely online services to virtual face-to-face advice. This is what customers expect. According to Accenture, the linking of physical and digital experiences called “phygital” is becoming a standard. The competitive advantage in 2021 is end-to-end customer service platform that creates a secure and personalised dialogue between customer and advisor. This is why we are entering the Czech market with the LiveContract solution. Advisors can share real-time documents, videos, configurators with customers in an easy and fast way without prior registration/authentication/downloading an app. This enables online consultation without loss of personal access. The platform allows the customer to make an instant purchase decision and sign the contract directly during the consultation without any interruption, in a legally binding manner according to the EU eIDAS regulation on any end device. What will not change in the future are the demands for simplicity, speed, accessibility and customer convenience.

If you too want to increase your close rate and offer your customers the best experience read more here or book a demo here.

Quality assurance

There are six foundation blocks (Version control, Continuous integration, Issue tracking, Unit tests, Reviews, Code analysis) that ensure the quality of the software and therefore of the product itself. Various synergies between the specific parts enable transparency and maintainability. At the same time these components work as a toolkit for every single software developer.

Through the usage of a version control, each modification of the code is comprehensibly documented, and each version can be restored at any time. This grants flexibility to the development and allows a precise analysis of all arising errors of the software.

The use of a continuous integration (CI) system allows a controlled compiling of new software versions as well as continuous reporting for the developers regarding any arising errors during the compilation. Additionally, automatically elicited key figures, which display the state of the product, can be generated and reported. Features and bugs, as well as milestones and project tasks, are managed through the Issue tracking system (JIRA and / or Confluence). This creates traceable and transparent development from requirement analysis to delivery and allows the creation of relationships between individual tasks or features.

The Interaction between these three systems (Version Control, CI, Issue Tracker) as well as the interaction of the developers with them provides additional benefits, which increase the quality of the products even more. Any changes only need to be documented once, since the version control, issue tracking and CI systems automatically transfer the modifications. Because of this automatic transfer to the Issue Tracking System, every change is assigned uniquely to one requirement, which provides complete traceability to each action. The developer gains quick feedback through the CI System, since each change in code automatically generates a new software-version.

The usage of Unit-Tests and the integration of these tests into the CI System allows a quick identification and debugging of errors, even while the software is still in development.

Additional to this, reviews ensure that at least two people view and test the code before a component is cleared for further testing.

IoT solutions

Internet of Things is more and more often being used in various fields and sectors and is becoming an essential part of our lives. It also brings numerous benefits such as costs saving, increasing effectivity or adding value to existing products and services. Thanks to the IoT, we can easily collect real-time data without having numerous people involved. IoT solutions save your time and money in a long term and help “normal” physical objects become digital devices.

The concept of IoT is very simple – it is basically taking physical objects and making them “smart” by connecting them to the internet by sensors. Once the device is connected to the internet, it can receive or send information (or do both). This can be done with different objects in various fields. We have experience with IoT projects in various sectors, such as the healthcare sector (e.g. to monitor and control medical devices and ensure its future service and maintenance) or in real estate (for example for room occupancy measurement).

The foundation of the IoT architecture consists of:

“Things”: objects which are connected to the Internet and monitor and gather information about their environment. They send the information to the IoT gateways.
IoT data acquisition systems and gateways: collect the unprocessed data, convert them into digital streams, filter and pre-process them so that they are ready for analysis.
Edge devices: in charge of further processing and enhanced analysis of data.
Data centers: data is transferred, stored, managed and further analyzed here. The centers can be either cloud-based or installed locally. This is where the data is stored, managed and analyzed in depth for actionable insights.

Our team has know-how and experience in developing and designing tailor-made IoT solutions perfectly fitting to your needs. Discover the world of IoT with us and transform your products and services to another level!

Atlassian products in xitee

xitee has had a rich experience with Atlassian products since 2007. Atlassian products (especially Jira and Confluence as well as Plugin`s) are key systems for xitee and cover all processes in many areas – it is not only Software development or Service management, but also the HR management and ISO management including internal documentation. All Atlassian products that we use are completely and directly managed by xitee IT Operations (hosting, installation, configuration, customization, monitoring, …). IT Operations is a crucial part of xitee. A team of 8 highly qualified people covers almost all areas of IT Operations, and nursing of Atlassian ecosystem is one them.

List of Atlassian application what we use (sizing included)

Jira Software + Core (more than 70 projects, 20 000+ issues)
Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk)
Confluence (60 spaces, 3 000 pages)
Bitbucket (50 repositories)
Bamboo (80 jobs)

We have been continuously improving our Atlassian stack using plugins, custom settings including custom workflows, issue types, screens, notification schemes, user macros etc. We are also using automation within Jira – for example custom parser of emails to extract the information and fill in into issue fields. In total we use around 15 plugins – the following are the major ones with highest added value for xitee:

Tempo Timesheets-Time Tracking & Reports for JIRA
Time to SLA for JIRA (more possibilities for SLA tracking)
Zephyr Scale – Test Management for Jira
ScriptRunner for Jira and Confluence (automation)
Reminder for Jira – Follow Up Issues
Table Filter and Charts for Confluence

We have experience with retrieving information from the Jira database to MS Excel and with direct interaction with Jira via api.

Intranet in Confluence (was realized without any expensive plugin)

FinTech solutions

Synergy of finance & technology gives us a fair clue intothe topic of this rapidly growing industry. FinTech mainly focuses on business, which uses technological advances to boost or automate processes in financial services. It ranges from investment applications and mobile banking to insurance and cryptocurrency.

FinTech has grown rapidly over the past few years due to massive increase in the internet and especially smartphone usage. However, it is not limited only in this area since FinTech has been firstly implemented in the commercial sphere – introduction of ATM’s, credit cards followed by automated & high-frequency trading.

Uses of the FinTech is in the world of finance almost endless. Main drivers are innovative start-ups that push the innovation level over the edge. Therefore, traditional banking institutions must adapt rapidly to the ever changing FinTech environment. An interesting area is the combination of trading with AI & Machine Learning, where the ability to predict market movements is invaluable.

Working in financial markets is connected to some specifics such as:

Trading systems must process huge amounts of messages during market peak times. That requires a complex system architecture extensively optimized for high throughput and low latency. Such a peak may reach magnitude of hundred thousand messages per second with latency measured in milliseconds.
Frequent need for a system integration via bridge applications connecting existing systems without need to change them. Building new system interfaces. Typical example are FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol converters.
High Availability system design for mission critical systems. Robust system design with redundant parts (no single-point-of-failure) and a real-time system health monitoring allows high system availability reaching or exceeding 99.99%. It can be also combined with 24/7 operation mode (without any service batch). Several systems we developed or maintain are considered as a critical infrastructure in Germany, Austria, and other countries.

xitee has a profound experience in working for leading European stock exchanges and FinTech companies. For more information, see our projects.